Sept. 3

Ect! (Eat!)

So far, I’ve totally loved all of the food here. The juice is awesome-really thick and sugary-and these jelly-like candies they had waiting for us in our kitchen put the orange-slice candies in America to shame. After what I’ve already experienced, I’m sure I’ll be writing about food a lot in this blog, ha.
During the week, we all go to the elementary school’s “cantina” for lunch. We have our own “grown-up” table next to all of the little kids, and eat whatever the cooks make them. So far, it has all been way delicious: lots of potatoes and beef and cabbage… lots of veggies (that I definitely wouldn’t have eaten in elementary school) like tomatoes and cucumbers… bananas cooked in this milk kind of stuff… really hearty stuff, but small portions. Must be how all the Russian women stay so skinny. I’m getting more and more nervous to eat the food at this school, though, because I’m pretty sure the cooks have seriously contemplated poisoning us by now—we seem to keep doing everything wrong. One day we apparently stayed too long, another day we came later than they wanted us to... While they don’t speak a word of English, they are very good at using body language to convey their complete disgust with us, haha.
The worst moment with the cooks thus far, though, was when I had to try and explain that I couldn’t eat the pancakes they were serving (after much internal debate, I decided that telling them I was allergic was better ((and safer)) than having them think this snotty American girl just wouldn’t eat their food). After a few minutes of probably the most unpleasant game of charades I’ll ever have to play, I finally decided to just give up and try to talk to our coordinator about it that night—which, because of our stupid phone/internet situation, didn’t happen. Consequently, the next day when we all sat down to eat, one particularly unfriendly cook set bowls of soup in front of each of us, and then pointed to mine and said “You. Veg-uh-ti-ble. No meat,” and marched off. Apparently, she had heard me say “wheat” the day before, and translated that as being “meat.” Ugh. I felt awful… I really didn’t want to have to talk to her about it again, especially after they’d already gone out of their way to make me something different. After weighing my options, though, I finally determined that being sick for 4 months wasn’t worth it: thanks to my Russian/English dictionary, which had the words “wheat” and “disease,” we’ve now worked things out, I think. Hopefully, we grow on them eventually, and I don’t have some Russian, death-inducing drug slipped into one of my bowls of cabbage soup before this trip is over.

Oops.

Today, we got to take our first field trip to the outskirts of Moscow to learn how to take the metro around, since we’ll be doing that on our own tomorrow. I made my first money exchange (630 rubles for $20)—pretty cool—and also had my first mini shopping fiasco—pretty uncool. After bouncing out of the store with my first Russian purchase, and what I thought was shampoo and conditioner, my amused coordinator informed me that I’d just bought 2 shampoos. I was pretty bummed. They were really expensive too—still cheaper than anything else they had there, but still. In my slightly-overwhelmed state in the grocery story, I also somehow ended up accidently buying two deodorants instead of one. All of these ruble-to-dollar conversions and Cyrillic letters everywhere are shutting off my brain.