What have we learned, our first year in Moscow?
The Metro moves 9 million people a day, and every single one has pushed me.
The happy lamp is used everyday.
How to say carrot. (Now I'm working on learning treedsats-voisem, my shoe size.)
A food called "cottage cheesy miracle" tastes like yogurt.
Learning very little Russian will not impede your success in making friends in high places, as long as you go to the American school. Camille's best friend moved into a new apartment "But the walls are still being carved," she tells us. Oh, I hate it when that happens. And this morning I asked Camille how Alex got them all from school to his house for the end-of-the-year-sixth-grade-party and she tells me "Limo."
You can still buy a pickle from a barrel.
Three inches of new snow calls for three-inch heels. Silver leather pants optional.
This is a country of readers–people walking down the street reading, reading on the metro, every farmer's market has a used-book stall–the literacy rate is 99.4%. I however, am functionally illiterate.
I'm happy when I figure out a word and discover it's an english word: "best seller" written in cyrillic. Or when a restaurant is named something I can figure out: Kroshka and Kartoshka, "Crumb and Potato,"or "Yolki Palki" –which means Christmas trees and sticks but Peter's dad always said it to mean, "Boy Howdy."
Our closest metro station: Krasnopresnenskaya, it's even better in Russian: Краснопресненскауа.
Russia's got a long to-do list–art, ballet, chocolate, maybe we'll get lucky enough to go back to St. Petersburg and we can see the room where Rasputin was poisoned, shot and tied up, also still need to see the Tetryof Gallery. And maybe I'll really buckle down and learn the numbers eleven to twenty.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 
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