***Part 2 of 3(?)*** I’ve been home for a few days and the hospital experience is starting to fade in my mind. I can say for sure that it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. The hospital was very very clean, … Read More
***Part 1 of 3(?)*** This is not a horror story, this is not a sad post. This is not the tale of some foreigner who got rushed into emergency surgery. This is, however, my story of spending a week in … Read More
It’s holiday season again in Russia. It started with a commercial nod to Valentine’s Day (“подари ей цветы!”) in all the local florist shops. Then came Defender of the Fatherland Day on Feb. 23, where presents range from a can … Read More
Movie time! 🙂 The original movie: Inspired these… The original movie: Inspired this title… Have you encountered any books / restaurants / monuments inspired by a famous Soviet film? Leave me a comment!
мозаика @ Южно-Уральский государственный технический колледж, Yuri Gagarin mosaic at South Ural Technical College Behold the «Завоевание космоса»…“The Conquest of Outer Space”! According to this interview, the mosaic was created in 1976 to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Gagarin’s spaceflight. … Read More
Finally, after ambitiously lugging this Russian textbook halfway across the world… more than once 😳… I’ve almost finished it. Just a short chapter (declension of numbers/dates/times, how delightful) and 60 pages of verb stats to go! 😄 Having reached this … Read More
Winter in the Urals seems like a time to settle for bland food—potatoes, frozen veggies, the occasional imported orange—but nope, the city is actually bursting with dragonfruit, lychee, and locally-grown lettuce. This carries over into the restaurant scene. Meals come … Read More
Russian vocabulary + a famous face… can you help me figure these out? #1. What’s the difference between оливки and маслины? Are they simply green olives vs black olives? #2. What’s the difference between адвокат and юрист? #3. Why is … Read More
January felt like a good month for learning Russian! This year we took part in a legit Крещение celebration, the kind that has a village priest standing on ice at night, reading aloud from the Bible, with a choir singing behind … Read More
I read this in a fashion magazine last month: Думаешь над фэмили-луком? What, фэмили-лук? Hmmm…. A few days later I passed a store window advertising matching his-and-hers holiday sweaters with the words семейный образ. What’s the difference? How do people … Read More