Happy Birthday Ben!

(This post doesn't have all that much to do with Ben, but it's his 18th today :))

So, I've been in the motherland for almost a week now, crazy times, everything is going really well but there is still so much to get used to (not least having to eat half a cucumber with every evening meal!). This week has mostly consisted of mornings at school, afternoons exploring this beaut of a city and evenings with our babushka eating some new and somewhat interesting food! Yesterday night was a lot of fun - went into the city to meet up with some friends, and I also learned a valuable lesson that it is VERY important to listen to your babushka when she explains time and time again how to open the door to her flat as this would have prevented us from throwing ourselves at it at 3am in order to get in (which was a successful technique all the same). Here double glazing on doors and windows works quite differently - they literally have two doors and two windows about a centimetre apart!

Language is definitely another one of my struggles at the moment - our babushka doesn't speak a word of English which is definitely a good thing for us (either that or she is pretending and can in fact understand every word we say, including our comments on the food, uh oh!) but the fact that sentences like 'Da, gracias' are coming out of mouth is slightly concerning.

I'm sure you'll want to hear about food (if not I'm sorry) so here's a little paragraph about that.

It's not the greatest.

But it's not all bad - I love pelmeni which are like tortellini but dumplings and I really love blini (the little Russian pancakes) so if all goes badly from here on, at least I can live off those! The sort of food we've been eating hasn't been terrible and it's definitely not all pickled, but it has mostly been some sort of meat, a lot of potato, a cucumber between us and some more salad/veg on the side. But we always have some Russian style tea to drink which is yummy and a nice biscuity cake thing to go with it. I think it's best not to talk too much about Rye bread - nothing (from jam to choccy spread) seems to help us with that one.

Hoping to find some sort of volunteering work this week, could be interesting!

Love, Лиза x

I'm not sure if you can really see, but the flavours of crisps here are quite something - a choice of caviar, crab, spring onion, cream cheese or kebab!

The Hermitage

Church of Spilled Blood

Smiley Pelmeni!

"sabveyy"