Weather Report – sunny and 74 F (23 C) – the last few days have been really, really nice

Adjustment Challenges – some things just don’t work like you think they would… I recall a Russian told us once “you’d think it was the Russians who invented duct tape…”. Additionally, using things like appliances is just intuitive…. Thankfully, the manuals for our appliances were left in our cottage…. And some of them are even written in English

Funny Observations – even when it’s warm out… very few people in Russia wear shorts.

Greetings from Russia… Sara and I went to a little corner market up the street to get bread and cheese for dinner (we’re having pasta with red sauce, salad, and garlic bread for dinner). This was a more typical Russian store where everything is behind a counter and you have to ask for it. We learned today that in stores like these, you pay as you go (i.e. if you want a loaf of bread, you ask for the bread, they give it to you… you pay them in rubles… they give you your change, and you move on). There are no shopping baskets… bring your own if you’d like. Oh – and if you are short on cash, you might find a slot-machine in the store so perhaps you can win money for groceries.

As I was saying… we wanted to get fresh hard cheese for dinner… maybe some parmesan or asiago… we knew we would not find these specifics… so we figured we would just ask to feel the cheese to find a hard one. It is very difficult to find a “hard” cheese in Russia… anyways, we managed to convince the woman behind the counter to let us touch the cheeses. As expected, we couldn’t find a hard one, so we asked for a piece of one that looked good. She cut off our piece, put it in a little bag… and gave it to us. We’re trying to learn and use Russian when speaking… so I said, in my best Russian… “Hi”… that’s right… I said hello to this woman about six times… then I realized that:

1. I confused the words for “Hi” and “Thank You”
2. I had to pay here on the spot

So once I realized my vocal errors… I gave her 150 rubles (in the form of a 100 ruble bill and a 50 ruble bill – this is the total equivalent of ~$5 USD). The cheese was very cheap… just a few rubles (i.e. far less than $1)… fortunately, she was kind enough to not take advantage of us, and gave us appropriate change. We selected a loaf of fresh bread (it smells really good… the bread here is very tasty… Atkins friendly this country is not…)…. paid 9 rubles for it (about 30 cents)…. and headed out the door.

We walked back from the store feeling a small bit of success… and laughed about how foolish we probably looked. Maybe next time we’ll bring our own grocery bags J

Thanks for reading…
Michael