- 2/19/2008 10:00:00 PMMoscow Trip - Day 9Today is the last day we will spend at Peter and Luda's. There is nothing to do but pack our things, eat and wait. The train pulls out of Cheboksary around 6:20 PM. We will catch a taxi to get there.
We had an interesting lunch today. Luda made cottage cheese and raisin stuffed pancakes. Luda's pancakes are much flatter than the typical American pancake. After they are fried, she puts a glob of her cottage cheese/raisin stuffing in the center and wraps them up into a ball. Then they get baked. She serves them with either sour cream, or some kind of fruit preservative such as blackberry or strawberry. They are very good but again, I'm not too sure they are good for you. I ate three of them.
During each meal, Luda serves a plate of cut vegetables, cheese, and meat. Sometimes she will just slice a tomato and a cucumber. Yuri loves them. They are very refreshing to eat along with your meal. Other times, Luda will serve cheese with ham. It is not a real ham slice but rather processed ham. Yuri refers, to all such meats as kielbasa. We usually only use that term with polska kielbasa - the spiced, ring shaped sausage. Yuri likes the kielbasa but not the cheese. He says he has a cheese allergy but we know better. He just doesn't like to eat it. We are working with him on some of his eating habits. If he is going to live in Wisconsin, he will have to learn to embrace cheese. It is a way of life.
Luda has been a big help in translating thoughts and ideas between us and Yuri. Being a school teacher for 25 years, she has seen and dealt with children a lot and Yuri doesn't get to far in trying to play one adult against another. After we leave Luda's, it will be important for both us and Yuri that Peggy and I present a unified style of parenting. Yuri will get the same answer about issues that come up regardless of who he goes to.
Peggy did more school with Yuri today. Sveta says we must be very strict with him because he is lazy with his school work. He has a lot ahead of him. Not just learning school but taking what he has already learned in Russian and using it in English. One example is numbers. Over the last few days we have played hundreds of games of fish and Crazy 8. It is good for number matching and identification. Yuri knows his numbers fairly well - in Russian. The English pronunciation is different for about half of the numbers.
When he sees the number 7 card, he always says, "six-seven". I think he does this in the same way that some kids think that "LMNOP" is one letter because you sing that part so quickly in the alphabet song. He has some trouble with 9 and 10 also. I don't envy the learning curve ahead of him, but he has shown that, just like any kid - he can do well when he wants to.
Yuri received some music cd's from the orphanage. They seem to listen to some kind of pop-disco-funk - like you might hear at a teen dance hall in a big city. I haven't heard the songs but when I read some of the titles and saw some of the covers I was a little stunned any of the children had them. We took them away and got rid of them.
Luda called for the taxi around 5:25 PM. The first taxi she called wanted 100 Rubles for the ride (which is relatively short) and then 30 additional Rubles for each bag - we have 5. It would be cheaper to call 2 taxi's, so we did. Luda asked them to send a Volga-Bona mobile because they are larger. We split into 2 groups. Luda, Yuri and I went in one car and Peggy and Luda's sister went in the other.
When we got to the train station, we had to walk nearly the entire length of the train to get to our car. It was near to the front. When be boarded, it was filled with smoke from cigarettes - YUCK!. The first train ride smelled like it had been a smoking car once upon a time, but this one was a smoking car now. We kept our compartment door closed to keep the smoke out and it became like a sauna. It was either that or gag. Even with the door closed, we could still smell it due to the vent in the bottom of the door. I put a big wool blanket over the top of my suitcase and pressed it up against the vent. It helped a little.
Each train car has a speaker that plays some kind of Russian POP music. Some of it was neat, some not. We wanted to turn it off but there didn't seem to be a way to do it. While we looked around for the volume knob, a song came on that sounded like they were singing our name, "something something something... Zapata - Zapata something something something Zapata - Zapata". I recorded it because I didn't thing anyone would believe it otherwise.
On this train ride, no meals were served and we had to pay 30 Rubles for coffee and tea. Yuri also wanted a magazine but we said "no". Luda had packed some extra stuffed pancakes for us to eat along the way. As we pulled out of the station, Yuri waived at the window, "Goodbye Cheboksary!". When ever Yuri would see something out the window, he would holler out, "Papa look at me, look at me". We tried telling him to drop the "at me" part. He was so excited he could hardly sit still.
One thing I noticed about our view is that in Russia, they seem to use color very differently than we do. The buildings here are often multi colored - like green with orange, or light brown with dark brown or some times with white or tan triangle sections. On the other hand, the people out side dress in dark drab colors. Coats are typically one of the following colors: black, brown, or dark gray. Every once in a while, you will see a bright color but they are the exceptions.
As we continued out of town, we saw other trains. The buildings got smaller and farther between. That didn't matter though. Everything Yuri saw out the window was followed by, "Look at me!". It was not long before it was too dark to see any of the small Anatevka like towns. Around 8:00 PM, we opened up the pancakes and had an evening snack - then we laid down for the night.
Some time around 10 PM, we were all still awake looking out the window. That is when we broke out the cheese and crackers. Yuri liked that. There we were - on a train going across deep snowy Russia - in our pajamas - having a picnic - at night. After this we really settled in for the night. I have not been dreaming much since we got here but tonight I did. Mostly of things from home and work, problems that need to be addressed and missing my family. I would wake up every hour or so, roll over and fall back asleep. Then the dream would change to some other issue weighing heavily on my mind. It was a long night.
