Spaso House, Moscow

I must say that I pulled a dirty trick on Cindy for her birthday and I loved every minute of it.  She has wanted an iPad2 for a very long time and I had ordered it three months ago. Because of the earthquake in Japan there was a backlog of orders and the unit did not arrive in Charles Town until one day before I left two weeks ago.  I purchased a Kindle as a placeholder for her, just in case, so last night I made believe that the Kindle, plus a nice watch, were her birthday gifts.  She was gracious but I knew she was disappointed, so I asked her if she wanted a drink or something else – like perhaps another gift. She was very happy with the iPad2 and now she has to learn how to use it.

We had some friends over for Champagne and caviar to celebrate.  I have to tell you that getting caviar in Russia is not as easy as one might think. I finally found a place that carried the good stuff and purchased 100 grams for the equivalent of the gross national product of Peru.  It took about twenty minutes to complete the transaction since there was one person who had the key to the cooler, one to take the caviar to the checkout line and another to actually ring it up.  I think it is easier and cheaper to get cocaine in Moscow.  I served the caviar with warm blinis and sour cream and I must say it is as addictive as cocaine. It was truly something to enjoy and savor and we all had a grand time. 

Dinner at Ragout was much better than our first visit and we all had magnificent dishes, which were shared. The wine was ice cold and affordable enough to have three bottles.  Needless to say we were all feeling quite relaxed after dinner.

Today was a party at Spaso House, the residence of the US Ambassador. Cindy played with her trio for an hour as the guests arrived and it was a truly elegant affair.  Great food, wines and one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in Moscow.  I had a chance to talk with the Ambassador and extend the best wishes of his friend HRH Marie Louise, Princess of Bulgaria.  He was gracious and interested in knowing how I met her and we had a nice little chat.

It is late and we are home and looking forward to a quiet and relaxing Sunday. With best wishes, Cindy and Wm

PS the other day Wm wrote about the kids we saw dancing in a production in the park.  I was so impressed and at the same time feeling a little sad that we don’t have any similar traditions in the U.S.  Well, yesterday at AAS they proved me wrong, at least where it comes to our students (65 nationalities, but the largest share are North American or British).  We have a former Bolshoi dancer on our teaching staff and it’s a year long project to teach all of the 4^th graders (about 100 of them) some Russian folk dances.  They all have costumes and they started and ended with the whole group dancing together (Kalinka was last), and in between each of the 5 classrooms were doing a different dance.  While it may not have been as polished as what we watched in the park, by golly those kids knew the steps and were in unison!  Some of the boys even did pretty well at the Cossack style “squat kicking”.  It was so cool that it was enough to bring a tear to my eye.

Big Birthday in Moscow

Happy Birthday to my darling Cindy and adorable Valley!!

Cindy at Sixty

It is a June Third day in Moscow, which means picture perfect as it always was for Cindy’s birthday in Anoka, MN.  She is coming home at five and we’ll start the party.I must say, with all objectivity, that she is one good looking sixty-year old.  She just gets better and better and this photo shows. 

Swan Lake was absolutely lovely and I stayed for the entire performance. I wasn’t thrilled with the male lead, but the rest of the corps was just perfect. Perhaps this is common in Russia, although we don’t remember it from Romeo and Juliet, but every time the male or female lead had a solo or a Pas de Deux, they would take bows. Not just a head nod of recognition, but full fancy bows, stage center. They really played the crowd for all it was worth. The pit orchestra was really wonderful and we had a lovely view from our balcony of the violin soloist, who stood while performing even though no one could see him.  It shall always be fun to say, ‘Yes, we saw Swan Lake at the Bolshoi’. 

I put in two eight-hour days at the embassy unloading hundreds of boxes.  They are most appreciative of my efforts and gave me a free bottle of water and a coffee, which I hope won’t ruin my amateur status.  I was invited to the Embassy Staff picnic today so I must have done okay to be considered Staff!!

That’s it, have to become a party planner now and get things moving.  Best wishes and happy weekend to all, Cindy and Wm.

Sour Cream Omelette, potatoes and avocado

Countdown Begins

It would appear we are in the final countdown and things are moving at a rapid pace.  Lots of little things to do, mostly paperwork, but it is all getting done and we are still on track to be out of here at the end of the month.  We postponed turning in our passports and diplomatic cards until I return from Germany next week, so that gives us a bit of breathing time.

Cindy has wanted to invite a couple here that had her over for dinner once when I was gone. They had the movers come for their stuff yesterday so they have nothing to really cook with and it was either have them come tonight or bag it.  I can’t believe that we have almost no free nights before we depart.  I had to go shopping since there really wasn’t anything in the house.  I have never seen such gridlock on the streets of Moscow as I did today. There is a one-way street that Ts near our market. It normally has three lanes, two to turn left and one to turn right. Today it had SEVEN and it caused shear chaos; the solution of course was to blare your horn, which I can still hear in the apartment.  Walking home with two heavy bags provoked a great deal of sweat since it is a lovely 78° today.

In case you missed it, today is NO TOBACCO DAY here in Russia and perhaps all over the world. It surely is not observed here.  Even when you go into a café that has a no smoking area, you are condemned to contaminating your lungs.  What is observed in Moscow is authoritarian rule.  You are free to protest if you are protesting something supported by the central government.  Do not however, try to protest for Gay Rights or against the authoritarian rule of the dynamic duo.

I had gone to the embassy for a few things yesterday, but most of the shelves were bare, which means a new shipment is coming soon.  I did find a box of frozen scallops so I made a scallop and edamame stir fry with garlic rice.  I served it with a small salad of shaved carrots, garlic, raisins and arugula with a spicy sesame dressing.

Just got the call from the embassy that I’m needed to unload the new shipment tomorrow and inventory it on Friday. That means I’ll most likely not post anything for the next several days.  Tomorrow night we have tickets for Swan Lake at the Bolshoi and the next night we are busy celebrating Cindy’s birthday.  I’ll fill you in on all of this on Saturday.

This is what happens when you park illegally under our bedroom window.

Best to all, Cindy and Wm.

Ranting in Moscow

I have been blessed with the gift of perfect selective memory.  I can remember always being a perfect child, never having made any mistakes in my life and always having made the right decisions.  It is this gift that allows me to rant, mostly to myself, but sometimes to others, about the stupidity of today’s youths. On the one hand, I really don’t care if they kill themselves ‘Planking’, or die from various cancers by smoking hookahs, but on a more personal level, these are the people who should be paying taxes to support me in my old age and I can’t afford to have this revenue stream diminished.  This whole hookah thing is very strange to me and has been since I first read Alice In Wonderland and couldn’t understand what a caterpillar was doing smoking.  We have seen lots of hookah bars around Moscow and other spots in Europe but the idea of passing around the mouthpiece and comingling bodily fluids with strangers is almost as foreign to me as smoking the darn thing.

Anyway, the idea of ranting to the wind reminded me of a distant relative, Charlie Kean, who lived with his wife Lulu on a small farm in Westport Connecticut. In the early 1950’s there were a lot of small farms in Westport, which is now one of the most expensive places to purchase homes.  In fact, Paul Newman purchased his house only a mile from Charlie’s farm.  This farm was just large enough to sustain Charlie and Lulu.  She would put up fruits and vegetables and store them on rickety old shelves in their dirt floor basement. I still have wonderful memories of going down those stairs and having my nose assaulted with the rich peaty smell of dirt, mingled with the sweet aroma of bread and butter pickles.

Charlie took care of some livestock, which I think were mostly chickens and ducks. He had what seemed to me to be the largest grinding stone I had ever seen. He would sit there and pedal away while sharpening his tools and even his pitchfork.  In addition to using the pitchfork to turn hay, he used it to spear pike and pickerel, which lazed about in the little brook that ran through the property.

My sister and I would visit and stay with them on hot summer days and Lulu would give us each a saltshaker and tell us to go out and catch some birds.  She had us convinced that all we had to do was sprinkle some salt on birds’ tails and then they couldn’t fly and we could pick them up and bring them back to the house as pets. We would run and run and try to sneak up and then run some more until we retreated to the well where we would drink the cold water out of a tin cup that was tied to the well pump handle with bailing twine.   I digress!

Charlie was the first person I ever knew that ranted and he would rant about anything.  Sitting in his chair in the morning drinking his coffee out of the saucer, he would complain about politics, weather, the darn radio, stinking commies, and a host of other topics, most of which I didn’t understand.  What I did understand however was when he would raise his pitchfork to the skies cursing the confound aeroplanes that would be the curse of man.  At that point I knew I wanted to learn to fly.

I had thought we were going to go out for dinner last night, but one look at Cindy when she got home convinced me that it would be good to just stay home.   I made a nice fluffy sour cream omelette with herbs de Provence and two cheeses.  I served them on beds of spinach with some pan-fried potatoes, onions and garlic. It all went very well with a nice Badger Creek Chardonnay/Semillon from Australia.  I didn’t know there were Badgers in Australia but it probably sounds better than Wombat Creek.

Best to all, Cindy and Wm

From CC:  Must find out how I looked when I got home last night!!!  I figured I was as adorable as ever but apparently not.

Monday Chores

Cindy didn’t have to be at school early today and so we planned on sleeping until 6:30 and yet at 5am we were up and couldn’t get back to sleep so she took the normal bus.  It was far too light for me to try and go back to bed - plus I had stripped the bed linens so that I could wash them - so I was condemned to staying awake.  I did several loads of laundry in preparation for our house cleaner to iron.  I cleaned all the jars of spices, the spice racks, the spice corner, and several hard to reach places in the kitchen. By that time the bed linens were ready so I remade the bed. I couldn’t believe it was still only 9:45 and I was pooped. The cleaner finally came at 10:45 and I exited the apartment and walked for two and a half hours and did a little shopping before returning to the clean apartment.  The Russian equivalent of cottonwood trees are all tossing out their little white fluffy seeds and it looks like it is snowing in some parts of the city.  You have to be careful walking through that stuff since it can get into your nose and mouth, and man does it suck the moisture out of your system. If I had had a camera there was a great shot of all of this tree ‘snow’ with fully blossomed lilacs and chestnuts in the immediate background. Quite lovely.

Yesterday must have been a Vietnamese holiday of some sort since there were scores of them, half kids and half adults, yelling and partying well past 10 pm right under our bedroom window.  Right now there are about fifteen kids between the ages of one and seven yelling and crying and screaming, right under my office window. I shall not miss this part of international living.

Cindy has been trying to get the powers that be at AAS to give us an inventory list of what was in the apartment when we arrived.  We had purchased a lot of items from the people who lived here before us but we can’t find the list and we don’t want to sell anything that was provided by AAS.  So far no one has given her the list, but today someone in the admin office wrote to her to say that it looks like we are trying to sell a fan and room heater that belongs to the school.  They can’t give us an inventory list but they can tell us what belongs to them!! It is infuriating to say the least. The last thing we want is for anyone to think we are trying to take advantage of the school.

Since we had a late lunch yesterday our dinner was rather meager. I made chicken sandwiches with some fantastic bread we purchased at a bakery.  Nothing fancy, just wonderful sandwiches, a few pickles, some Fritos and sliced avocado.  Since everything is nice and clean in the kitchen, we’ll go to some neighborhood restaurant for dinner tonight.  The temperatures stay well into the seventies and the sun stays high until at least nine-thirty. If we were staying I would certainly purchase some blackout curtains to keep the sun out of our rooms in the afternoon and evening.

Best wishes, Cindy and Wm

Sunday In The Park With Cindy

One-Eye, A Byxbee Tradition

It has been a most pleasant day here in Moscow. We had coffee and one-eyes for breakfast and then decided to walk.  Warm temperature and clear skies invited us to travel to parts unknown so we headed to the Metro to make the connections needed to get to the neighborhood of Severnoye Tushino.  This is the last stop on one of the lines so it took us about thirty minutes, which makes it very close to one of the major airports.  It sits on the Khimkinskoye Reservoir and is home to the Russian Navy Museum, which the guidebooks say is open every day:  It is not!  We walked from the Metro stop and found the museum, thanks to Cindy’s dead reckoning.  We could see the three attractions from the edge of the water, an old nuke sub, a large old seaplane and a rather decrepit looking troop carrier.  I was somewhat relieved that the museum was not open since I didn’t relish spending money to look at those vessels.  We carried on through the big park following the music in the distance. We were following a path near the water and could see lots of hotel boats that go from Moscow to St. Petersburg - some looked iffy, others grand - and I’m sure it is a lovely voyage.

We found the source of the music and it was an elevated stage that had a troupe of young dancers in colorful costumes doing various folk dances. They were just superb and so well choreographed.  They did four routines, all with different costumes and songs and we just stood there surrounded by families with lots of kids, enjoying the dances until we decided to head for our next destination, a large church and a mansion.  We found neither, despite our long, long walks.  The map we had was useless and no one who lived in this town knew where they were.  The town itself is filled with Khrushev-era mass housing called ‘khrushyovkas’ and it is very depressing. It is also the most littered area of Moscow we have ever seen. The entire walkway through the woods was filled with the remains of parties from the night before. Tons of bottles, bags, paper plates; it was like we were in another country since we have never seen any litter in Moscow.

We walked until we were too tired to go on and gave up on finding the Bratsevo Mansion and the Church of the Holy Virgin and found our way towards the Metro. We stopped in what was billed as a café but it was really a restaurant so we had a nice late lunch of lamb meatballs and sliced roasted potatoes and ice-cold beers. A much needed rest stop.

Speaking of food, last night we stopped on the way home from our walk through Victory Park and purchased a roasted chicken from a street kiosk.  They first wrap the chicken in a huge sheet of flat bread (like a soft tortilla) and then wrap that in foil.  By the time we were ready to eat the bread had absorbed lots of the chicken fat, which made it taste simply divine.  We had a nice spinach salad with tomatoes and red peppers - and it was a great chicken and cheaper than purchasing a whole fresh chicken. Nice to know, now that we are selling most of our kitchen stuff.

Yesterday afternoon I was really flagging and couldn’t get it together enough to label photos and add prices on our sale goods.  I told Cindy I was too tired to continue and she seemed surprised I was so tired until I reminded her that I had traveled without sleep for 34 hours only two days ago.  Oops, said she – that was a big thing to forget!  Later on I told her that I had researched bottled water delivery in Charles Town since she had told me she has gotten used to the convenience of bottled water.  I explained how often they came, the various dispensers they offer and all the while she is looking at me like I’m from another planet. She finally said, “ I never asked for bottled water in Charles Town, we have two filtered water sources that are just fine.”  It appears that I had dreamt all of this and acted on my dream as though it was fact.  We are seriously thinking of committing ourselves.

Happy Sunday,  Cindy and Wm

Victory Park Excursion

Slept for about ten hours thanks to being exhausted and the wonders of pharmacology.  Feel wonderfully refreshed, as does Cindy who always needs the weekend to catch up on her sleep.  We had a lazy morning after our exercising and then started to work on getting all of our ‘stuff’ sold before we leave.  This involves spreadsheets, pictures, computers and emails.  We have priced everything well and think we’ll get rid of most of it. What we don’t sell, we’ll give away. We are attached to nothing.

Mahi with Lemon/Balsamic Sauce

Potato Pancakes with Sour Cream and Salmon Roe

Last night I just barely had the energy to make a quick dinner of Mahi, carrots and rice.  The rice was cooked in the carrot water, the carrots were just boiled and then tossed with butter and nutmeg and the Mahi had a new sauce I created.  In the same pan that I used to sauté the fish, I added the juice and zest of half a lemon, three chopped cloves of garlic, a quarter cup of lemon marmalade and a quarter cup of balsamic vinegar. I reduced it all to about half, added a teaspoon of butter and stirred a bit more and then covered the fish, which was on a bed of raw spinach.  The heat from the fish and sauce helped to wilt the spinach and it was a darn good meal.

This afternoon we took the Metro to Victory Park because it is on the list of things to see before we depart.  What a treat for us. It is huge, lovely and as an unexpected bonus, there was the Russian Army Choir singing lots and lots of great Russian music. They must have played for at least an hour, accompanied by a very good military band and some costumed dancers for some of the numbers.  Our favorite, well everyone’s favorite, is Kalinka, and if you think you have never heard it, you would be wrong.

I could go on and on about the park but I’ll let this video and these photos tell you the story.  It was a lovely afternoon and there were thousands of folks enjoying the beautiful day, most of them DRUNK or in the process.  It seems like today was National Let’s All Drink Beer Day. In reality today is the National Day of Border Guards, and there were hundreds of them identified by their green dress hats.  That was the only professional thing about them since the rest of their outfits were mostly shorts, ill-fitting shirts and flags. They ranged in age from mid-twenties to late fifties and they seemed all drawn together in their love of beer.  Each of them had a plastic bag filled with bottles of beer and/or vodka as they processed to the concert area.  We did witness the marching of some hundred security guards and they took up positions for monitoring the events that are scheduled for later today.  I’m sure I’ll read something about it tomorrow and suspect it might involve unruly behavior.

Speaking of beer, the Russians are about to declare beer an alcohol starting next month. This supposedly means that it won’t be sold to minors, as it is now since it is classified as a food.  There have been several attempts to limit the sale and public drinking of beer - they even raised the tax on beer by 200% last year - but still drinking beer is endemic to the Russian psyche.  Here are two great articles on some of the issues related to beer in Russia.

Time to get working on finishing our ads for our For Sale posting at Cindy’s school.  Hope you have a lovely weekend, Cindy and Wm.

From CC:  Wm is right, today was delightful, and he gets all the credit for choosing to visit Victory Park today.  We were perusing a Website with lots of various walks described but they all seemed to be a bit much given that we were starting out past noon.  Victory Park got the nod and it was such a wonderful surprise to be treated to the military concert, in addition to the many stunning fountains, buildings, and monuments.  The weather was perfect to boot.