Best/Most Interesting Moments of the Past Week and a Half.

WEEKEND
This weekend, we got to play around Moscow again. Lots of good times:

Walking around Moscow State University.


One of "Stalin's Seven Sisters," which is an interesting story worth Googling. Very beautiful and huge. Wouldn't let us in the main building (you have to show a student id), but we still enjoyed the grounds and a huge science exhibition going on in one of the smaller buildings.

Seeing a service inside the Christ our Savior Cathedral.


As you can see, this building was amazing. The service was quite interesting: the priests walked all around us swinging those smoking metal-box looking things, like they do in the movies. It was like being enveloped in extremely concentrated baby powder. I love the singing, though, they do in these cathedrals. Very simple and hauntingly beautiful.

I have had so much fun roaming around in these cathedrals here! So many little nooks and teeny stairways you can explore.

Walking along the Moscow River.



My new favorite part of Moscow.

And last but not least... getting to go watch the Sunday sessions of General Conference... in English!
So many great talks. The institute building was packed: about half English-speaking and half Russian-speaking. The English room consisted of four of us roommates and about 50 American missionaries, which was kind of funny. Anyway, seeing and talking to some of the Russian members each Sunday has been so interesting and great. Makes you view and appreciate things in a different way.

WEEK
This week, I had the opportunity to live with a Russian family--Alexander and Julia Villakanovas (I think this is their last name...). It was so much fun! They were so good to me. Since Alexander and Julia both work everyday, I spent most of my time hanging out with their 10 year old named Sofia, who was on vacation from school.

She is such a cutie! Despite the fact that I ended up having to play about 50 hours of hide and seek with her this week (and that number is only a slight exaggeration), I'm going to miss Sofi for sure. She kind of became my little sister--which was nice, because I've been missing my own back home a lot lately. I also got to play with their other kids:


Irena, who we teach at the school too. I slept on the floor in the girl's room, and she would sing Russian songs to herself until she fell asleep every night. It was so cute.


And Andre. He was so cute too, ugh. It was kind of impressive how much communicating we could get accomplished with just "da," "niet," and a lot of pointing. :)

Ne panimyo.
Sofi and I had a lot of fun helping eachother work on our second languages--except that she is 100x more fluent in English than I am in Russian. She read a page from my Lord of the Rings book outloud to me yesterday as well as any American 10-year old could've, and then had me read a page of her RUSSIAN book outloud to her. Something about an amphibious man. While I could read it (woot), I comprehended probably less than 5% of it. I have a long way to go.

Asta la vista baby.
Having to be driven to the Villakanova's home every night gave me a new glimpse at the way the government does things here in Russia. Whenever our least favorite neighbor, the President of Russia, has any guests that he would like to bring to or from his house and the Kremlin, the entire road is shut down so that they can travel as comfortably and in the least amount of time possible. This happened at least 4 times this week when I was on the road. Once was because, we later found out, Putin had invited Arnold Schwarzenneger over for the day. Why Putin wanted to meet w/ the governor of California, I can not imagine. Perhaps he is a big Terminator fan. Whatever his reasons, though, completely shutting down a well-used highway, going into the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world, for several hours several times a week, is beyond ridiculous. And a small indicator of what kind of government they've got here. Hmmm.

"Rushing" Kaitlyn to the "Americanskaya Clinica" in the city.
Poor Kaitlyn (my roomie) has been getting more and more sick this last week. Finally a couple of nights ago as I was getting ready to head over to Alexander and Julia's, she said she needed to go to the hospital. Right then. So we called a taxi. We then waited two hours for the taxi to arrive (yes, the President was using the road). Luckily, she wasn't on the brink of death. I wonder how many people who need to go the ER die every week b/c Putin wants to be able to take his celebrities back from his house to the Kremlin in good time. Ugh. Anyway, Kaitlyn got some meds, so we're hoping she gets better soon.

Learning how to dress.
The first day as I was heading out the door to go play outside (it was 37 degrees) with Sofia, Alexander stopped me. Apparently, my jeans, sweatshirt and Keens (I had socks on under them) were "beach wear," and not suitable for going outdoors. He was actually kind of upset. It then took 30 minutes them all 30 minutes to bundle me up to their satisfaction. I can quite confidently say that I've never worn so much clothing in my life.

Teaching Sofia the "Hoedown Throwdown."
After doing this dance for an awesome ward talent show performance last semester, I didn't really think I'd ever do it again. Especially not to teach English with, and definitely not in Russia. After teaching me a Russian dance, though, the "Hoedown Throwdown" was the only simple "American dance" that wasn't absolutely stupid (ie "Soulja Boy") I could think of to teach Sofia. So, I did. It ended up being so much fun! She ate it up, and Julia thought it was the greatest thing ever, since you automatically learn some English phrases as you do it (although I doubt Sofi will ever find knowing the phrases "put your hawk in the sky" or "country-fy it" really helpful). Dancing around their living room was way fun!

Playing Barbies: Russian style
Russian Barbies, apparently, don't like having husbands and kids or going to school: which is what all of my make-believing seemed to revolve around when I was little. Instead, we were always having to go to "Club Banana" (a yellow chair she'd turned on it's side), where Sofia would play Kesha songs from her cell phone for our Barbies to dance around to. I think she thought I was a little bit strange when my Barbie always declined drinking any of the toy wine hers always brought along w/ them(who knew they made Barbie-sized wine?!). Ha. It was all very interesting.

Anyway, while figuring out how to do things in this Russian home was interesting and sometimes a bit awkward, I guess they all somehow liked me, because they asked me if they could have me stay over for another week in November. :) I'm already excited to go back!

FOOD AND DRINK: SOME NOTEWORTHY FIRSTS
This week was unusually interesting in this department.

Sour cream with jelly on top of it.
The gluten-free dessert I was served at lunch... literally. Not recommended.

Chocolates from Moscow's Red October Chocolate Factory
Both tasty and ridiculously cheap. The best part of it, though, was meeting these 2 girls from Moscow while we were trying to find it. One of the best parts of being here has just been getting to meet and talk with so many interesting people. Anyway, this chocolate shop had an overwhelming amount of multi-colored candies on the wall to choose from (and all w/ descriptions in Russian). So, we decided to just have these girls order us their favorites, without us knowing what we'd get. It was fun.

Dani and I w/ our friends and bag of chocolate.

Russian caviar.

Like eating those itty-bitty grapes you can get at CostCo sometimes. Except that the juice was fishy-flavored. I'd rather have grapes any day. Or sour cream covered in jam, even.

Herbal tea.
Nope, I'd never had it. The Villakanovas, like most Russians, drank a lot of tea, and so they were constantly giving me what they called "chai Mormon people can drink." They had some pretty humorous things to say about Mormons--made me laugh. Anyway, with enough sugar, I actually really liked it.

Er... wine.
Speaking of things "Mormons can't drink"... one longer story. First of all, this was 100% unintentional. Although my serious lack of observational skills were to blame. Apparently, wine comes in juice-box looking things here in Russia. Needing to take my allergy meds, I poured what I thought was cranberry juice from a very juice-carton looking container sitting on the counter at the Villakanova's house. Since I was taking medicine when I drank it (which I've heard you shouldn't do), I was drinking it very quickly (which I've also heard you shouldn't do); therefore, I gulped most of my glass down before my brain realized that this Russian juice was the wrongest thing I'd ever tasted. When Sofi walked in, I had just spluttered the phrase "What the heck!" and was staring incredulously at the nastiness that remained in my glass. She then told me what it was, and then laughed very hard. Then the nanny ran in who, as I was trying hard to wipe the look of complete repulsion from my face, kept trying to tell me through the Russian/English Charades game that wine was good for my stomach and would keep me warm. Or something like that. (This was the same woman who also charade-asked me one day if I loved Jesus. After saying that I indeed did, she then sang "I like Jesus, you like Jesus, we like Jesus..." for several minutes as she made dinner. It was kind of endearing and strange all at once.) Anyway, I now know to carefully look for the word "Вино" on any cartons of "juice" I plan on drinking from from now on.

Basically, being in Russia has still be awesome! Full of learning and adventure and fun.


The End.