Anastasiaweb! Two Weeks in Russia I spent my time living with a family in Pervouralsk, near Ekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains. The first new word I learned was kashmarr (nightmare), the Russian equivalent of c'est la vie(that's life). It applies to non-working escalators, delayed flights, and shops that are out of sour cream when you need it for a favorite recipe.
In the public rest-rooms there are no paper towels and often no toilet paper or seats. The toilet paper I did find is a lot like the brown paper towels in our gas stations. The shops are not empty, but they might not have a specific item that week. There were plenty of scarves in Pervouralsk, but none in Ekaterinburg. I never saw a pocketknife or ball-point pen for sale. I was glad that I had brought along 14 rolls of Kodak color print film.
Shannon Hospital donated about 50 pounds of medical supplies which went to the Cancer Hospital in Ekaterinburg. Patients were being sewn up with cotton thread because coated polyester suture wasn't available.
Eating was a new experience. For breakfast, I had kolimahr, which is squid and hard-boiled egg chopped up and mixed together. I had never eaten so much caviar, cold ham, sausage, and bread that you sliced yourself. Milk went from the cow to a milk can to me, not out of a carton from a store. I especially liked the cake made in the shape of a hedgehog. It looked like a brown armadillo with spines. Russian mustard is hotter than ours.
The average morning temperature was minus 5 C (23 F). People said it was an unusually warm winter.
We take too much for granted in the USA because no one has imposed a state religion on us. The old Lutheran church in Ekaterinburg was demolished by the Bolsheviks in 1920. They hope to rebuild it now with donations from the people, even though inflation is eating into the value of their money. The Pervouralsk brick factory donated 100,000 rubles. There is a Russian proverb that "If everyone in the world contributes a thread, a man without clothes can make a shirt." The Orthodox church in Pervouralsk was rebuilt last year. The brickwork looks a little rough, but there are plenty of worshippers to go up that icy hill and back down again.
About five years ago, there was a great scandal at the sausage factory because workers took the meat filler home with them and put toilet paper inside the skins instead. The price of sausage is such that a newspaper cartoon showed a man reaching to embrace his wife, calling her "Dear!" She eyed him suspiciously and said, "What am I to you, a piece of our sausage?"
I had some inconveniences in traveling, but nothing like the Swedish businessman I heard about who was trying to get to eastern Siberia. He was told repeatedly that his flight would be delayed another three hours, until he had spent 25 days sitting in the terminal. KASHMARR!
Katya and I are engaged to be married. We had the first Lutheran betrothal ceremony conducted in Pervomaysk in 70 years.
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