twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?"

Author: place2place

  • typical dinner

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    The closest grocery, Ramstore, or as Peter calls it, Ramshack, is a 5 to 10 minute walk. Today we bought light Jarlsburg (my favorite from Trader Joe's, same brand and everything) a big squash, orange juice, frozen string beans from Belgium, yogurt (they have the same kid brands as Niamey, it's imported from France) and a sesame bread, still warm. Stefan pulled our cart there. Usually he pulls it back too, but today he's still sort of sick and when we got home he had big circles under his eyes. 

    Stefan's homework was to draw a picture of what he had for dinner. Being sort of out of it, he fell asleep at 6:30, missed dinner and woke up at 10. I'm sure his classmates will have three courses illustrated: pork chops or roasted chicken and a salad with a homemade vinegarette, a fresh vegetable, then cheese followed by chocolate souffle. "Can't you draw what you had for lunch?" I ask him, at least that was soup and a tangerine. I'm a little embarrassed that his teacher is going to think I served us all Life cereal for dinner. 

  • moscow farmer’s market

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    I bought apples, tangerines, carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, onions and fresh salmon. One of the vendors gave me some very nice grapes. The salmon was $10 for four steaks. We paid $10 a steak the other day at the fancy grocery store, so I hope they are good.

    Available items I I didn't buy: cucumbers, pomegranates, beets, a pumpkin, coleslaw, chicken, pastries, rose hips or a fur hat.

  • create your own caption

    OMc

    I stole this from my friend Mike's facebook page. (See his amazing design work here.) "Are you keeping up with the elections?" he asked. "Yeah! David Cook won!" I said.

  • moscow, month one

    St.basils 

    Stefan got sent home from school yesterday with a fever, today he stayed home and of course was fine, talking to me non-stop.

    Camille stole my mascara and is at an after school "social." Sounds scary. Can't wait to hear about it though.

    The clinic is busy, but Peter likes it that way.

    In Friday night pizza news: the commisary has turkey pepperoni! 

    Our car is here, but we don't want it anymore.

    Stefan talked to me non-stop, but every night he says, "Papa is reading to me!"

    Minor miracle: Peter. got. us. out. of. the. iPhone AT&T contract. Now we are waiting for some sim card piggyback thingie to make the sim card here work. It's all very hush hush though and no one really knows how to make a US phone work here. I guess I'll be the first.

    We got our air shipment and so we have plenty of oatmeal and flannel sheets. Wish I'd put the immersion blender for soup in there. Am looking forward to having the paintings here, but we won't get our household effects until Thanksgiving or so.

    The Embassy newsletter designer/editor position just (re)opened. I'm secretly hoping for this position; don't tell anyone.

    I had a workout session with the trainer, a Russian woman in full make-up, and I couldn't walk for three days afterwards.

    I dropped a jar of peanut butter on my toe and it's six kinds of purple and I'm sure the nail will come off. It's completely disgusting. And a good excuse to avoid the trainer.

  • hello is not for beginners: stras-vee-chee

    MoscowMom took me on a whirlwind tour of Moscow. Wow, is she amazing. There we were in our coats and scarves, standing in front of St. Basil's, the mausoleum with Lenin inside, the Kemlin, we walked through GUM department store, bought tickets for the ballet Gisele at the Bolshoi Theater box office, got drinks to keep our hands warm at Starbucks on the Old Arbat, saw Pushkin's house, bought pastries at a fancier-than-France French bakery, with an Olympic gold-medal-winning tennis player standing in line behind us. Then we had lunch at the fabulous Cafe Pushkin. I want to take you there when you come visit, just look at it!

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    At the coat check, you get, not a plastic ticket, not a clothespin with a number on it, but a brass token, beautifully engraved with your number. The dishes are lovely, they give you a footstool for your bag to sit on, they serve twenty-four hour old shechee–although I had borcht, they make it with goose and apple. Then came my huge piece of salmon served on a bed of grilled lemon. The whole thing was dreamy, a perfect setting for Peter's Victorian Russian, must go there with him. The coat check guy holds your coat for you while you put it on, he practically buttons it up for you.

    Now I am back to reality, unpacking our airshipment, 700 pounds of the stuff we thought most important. We have a lot of flannel sheets and oatmeal. Four bikes and no garage. Maybe we'll keep them in the car, since I don't think we'll be driving it much. Maybe the car will be our garage.

  • mmmm…let’s see….

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    Here are a few observations and occurrences worth remembering in 20 years when I retire from the FS:
     
    a) Russian women go all out and dress to kill and Russian men do nothing and let themselves go and look like thugs.
    b) The health clinic is far busier than Niamey and I miss Amina terribly but I'm enjoying the newness of overwhelming patient care.
    c) The milk products in this country are to die for (and many people do die from the coronary artery disease they produce) and so worth it!
    d) Dina brought home beautiful salmon and trout last saturday which we broiled with teriyaki sauce and served with noodles and cabbage salad. It turned out to be smoked & salted fish and was so salty that it was in a hyper-osmotic state and the teriyaki sauce repelled off it and rolled off into a corner of the baking sheet as far as possible and refused to add any flavor. It was so salty, we couldn't eat it.
    e) I had 2 people resign (unrelated to me or my arrival) and suddenly I'm an administrator.
    f) Moscow is an expensive city to live in, especially if you haven't received your hardship differential, language, or cost of living adjustment.
    g) My Russian language instructors find me funny and I think they are all rotating me so that they can all have a chance to get a good laugh and look up some Russian words they haven't heard in years (A Gene-ism).
    h) Autumn lasts only 3 weeks in Moscow.
    i) I had my first medevac this week.
    j) Dina says it's more like Europe than Africa and our friend Alison says it's more like Europe than China and I agree.

  • gorky park

    Leaf_crownGorky_par4

    Russia has allowed me to have the internet!

    We rode the crazy-fast metro to Gorky Park, to visit the forest with tout de Moscou. The leaf bouquets and leaf crowns reminded me a Carl Larson painting. Then we sat in the park and had sheeshleek, the Russian version of brochettes, pork and chicken. You could also get a skewered whole trout, but we passed. If you go to walk in the forest of Gorky Park to make leaf bouquets you cannot be too dressed up. Four inch high heels are the correct shoe to wear with a leaf crown, apparently.

  • one of the seven sisters

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    Well, you know, you move to Russia and go to the grocery store and can't READ anything and which of the entire row of yogurts do we buy? Have you ever seen a entire case of sour cream? Cottage cheese? Man, they like their dairy here. Also, they seem to be into hot dogs. But certainly no shortage of tea, cookies, bread, chips, pears, or frozen pelimeni.

    I'm sure the speed and the incline of the escalator at the metro are not ADA approved. I feel like I need a running start to hop on, and whoa, is it steep. We rode the metro to the Bolshoy Circus. It was mostly the same as any nice circus you've been to, except on the way in, you can get your picture taken with a monkey.

    Plan on seeing a lot of the building you see here, it's one of the famous "Seven Sisters" and is right out our door. A famous ballerina lives there, which window, I wonder. Which ballerina?

  • commuter

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    Peter leaving the house to go to work. Today he figured out a shortcut, so instead of four minutes to walk through the front door of the clinic, it takes two minutes to walk in the back door.

  • First week in Moscow

    And what a week it has been! Perhaps the greatest struggle has been the jetlag. No matter how hard we try, we always seem to wake up at 2AM and cannot sleep until 6, which is the time we have to get up. News of the stock market crash and a 7 billion dollar bail out is about the jolt it takes every day to get our eyes open.

    We live in a very convenient American bubble right in the heart of Moscow. The American Embassy compound has all the conveniences of home; sports gym, post office, hair salon, food commissary, and a bar. It is quite easy however, to penetrate the perimeter and step into the sea of 13 million Russians. Even in the Embassy, I hear Russian all the time. Over 1000 Russians work here. The best part about it is that the kids are free to run around at will. They have already made friends with their peers and spend more time outside (for now) than they ever did in Niger.

    Dina and I went with a colleague of mine to get lunch at the local hole-in-the-wall. She led us into a Russian Orthodox church. The interior was hand carved wood with painted flowers and small tables covered with slovac embroidered tableclothes and an icon in the corner. I crossed myself. It looked like an old Russian movie set. The smell of baked bread permeated the place. Babushki served the food. We sat down among the old and young Moscovites and ordered a bowl of hot mushroom and barley soup and cabbage piroshki. After we finished, I left a tip. The babushka who served us handed me back my rubles and said, "leave it as a donation for the church on your way out."

    Tomorrow is Friday. We have tickets to go to the Bolshoi Circus with the kids on Saturday. Camille is liking her new social life and school. Stefan has had 2 days of the French school. Last night, we actually slept a reasonable 6 hours without interruption. I dreamed of Dyadya Oga. He drove me down a windy road in his VW van (he barely looked 50 but I wasn't a kid anymore) while trying to convince me that I should take this job. "I thought I did!" I said. "No you haven't. You haven't seen any patients yet!" Which was true.

    I started seeing patients today. It feels good to be useful again. I needed to make a complicated phone call to the States about a bill so as not to charge the Embassy and got all worked up and frustrated. I inquired at the nurses desk as to how to do it and the Russian doctor said, "just push zero and the operator will connect you."