Leningradskie Prospect. Looking to see how to get Sheryl Crowe tickets (yes! Here! In Moscow!) I looked up the venue, to see where it is located, and realized I could read those words, Ленинградский проспект, without actually sounding out each letter. I feel like Helen Keller, "water!"
And it only took two years!
I love it when I sound out a word, usually on a billboard, and it's English. "Business Class" on a Volkwagan ad. And on a billboard for a novel–billboards advertising novels! Can you stand it?– "Best-seller."
You have to say "beeziness closs" and "beast sellirrrr" with your best Russian accent, the way Camille says, Oy-zi Oz-borrrrrn, after hearing someone on the radio talk about his upcoming show. For which I am not trying to get tickets.
But most of the time, still, I painfully sound out the words and then I don't know what they mean.
This week I needed to add the word "remodel" to a headline, and that's one word I actually know, there are so many signs with that word on so many buildings being "remonted." But the cashier at the grocery store told us we could only be in her line if we had cash, and I had no idea what she was talking about. I don't know the word for wind, which we are having a lot of right now, or how to tell the vegetable stand lady that after being gone all summer, I'm happy to see her.
Russia has a self-proclaimed 99.9% literacy–see, communism accomplished something! Everyone here reads while riding on the metro, walking down the sidewalk, and yesterday I saw a guy reading a magazine while driving. But I'm illiterate. Russian is not one of those languages you just pick up. This is the week to sign up for language lessons, again.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 
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