So, it snowed this week. I still can't get over it. I mean, it wasn't REAL snow, in that it didn't stay on the ground, and it was only a few flakes, but STILL. This is the middle of October. In NC, we don't get snow til January, if then. I must have looked like a total dork walking through the park...I kept gawking up at the sky. But I literally couldn't believe my eyes - those little white floaty things in the air just couldn't be snow! But apparently they can...although even some of the Russians I've spoken with say it's a bit early for snow - just "a bit" early - can you imagine?!?
OK, weather rant over now. Although I get the feeling it won't be the last... This was a really busy week. ...Oh, wow, my radiator just made a sound like a rocket taking off...that's a new one to add to the list of apartment sound effects. OK. Hope it doesn't blow up.
Anyway, as I was saying, this was a really busy week. I didn't get any new classes assigned, but all this extra stuff seemed to appear to fill up my spare time. Not that that's a bad thing...most of the extra stuff was a lot of fun. On Sunday, I had my thirteen-year-old neighbor Lilya over for tea. She's this really sweet girl who really wants to learn English - and she speaks it surprisingly well for her age - so we had a nice chat in English and Russian for several hours. It was fun - and it was also fun to play hostess - she was my first guest!
On Tuesday - which will no longer be my day off; now I will have Fridays off instead, hooray! (because Tuesday is just a weird day to have off) - I went walking in the forest park again, the one I posted pictures of several blogs ago. The weather was yet again wet, but instead of being cool this time it was downright cold. It was still beautiful, though - all the trees have turned to gold, and the birch grove was absolutely beautiful. The wind was blowing, and the sound of the rain pattering and the breeze shooshing through the branches and feeling the cold wind against my face and seeing the branches waving so gracefully - it was a wonderful peaceful moment. I might seem to be waxing ridiculously poetical in saying it, but birch trees are beautiful in the wind - maybe because they have such straight, striking white trunks but such gracefully drooping branches...anyway, I took a video of it, and even though it didn't turn out great the link is here so you can sort of get an idea if you want. I also had the idea of taking parallel pictures in all the different seasons of the same birch grove - it will be interesting to see how it changes.
I also had dance class on Tuesday and Friday night. Tuesday was hard - I'm only just starting to get back into shape now, and I have some corrections to work on...since I've been giving myself class all summer, there are some things I've let slip since there was no one to see and correct them, so now I have some catching up to do. It's all good, though. And Friday night was great - class was really enjoyable, and even better, I got to make friends with one of the ladies from the class. I wasn't sure if it would be possible to get to know anyone from the class very easily, because I was pretty sure they were all convinced I didn't speak Russian at all, since they know I'm a foreigner, and I'm not very confident about starting conversations in Russian yet. But Polina started a conversation with me in English, and it was so nice to get to know someone from the class! Now that I know one person, maybe it will be easier to get to know everyone else, too.
Last night was interesting because I went to a contact improv class with Lena. I had never heard of contact improv before coming here, but apparently it actually started in the States. It's a kind of dance that is all about the contact, both mental and physical, between two people as they improvise to music. Last night's class was focused on martial arts and tumbling techniques that can be used in contact improv, and Lena and I ended up being the only two people there - so we basically got a three-hour private! It was very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's my kind of dance. I'm so used to the idea of dance as being all about giving something of yourself to your audience - making them feel some sort of emotion and taking them out of the everyday world for a little while. But contact improv is not about your audience at all - it's all about the connection between you and your partner. It's a very unusual idea for me.
Today was eventful in that it is the day before Tom's birthday, so Laura, Sara, and I were all conspiring on how to get presents and such for him without him noticing. I volunteered to make a cake while the three of them went to a hockey game this afternoon, a mission which involved several deep dives into my Russian-English dictionary to figure out how to translate cake terms for an expedition to the grocery store - "baking soda" and "baking powder" were particularly crucial terms. Well, baking soda proved easy to find, but baking powder presented more of a challenge. I found two words for baking powder - "пекарский порошок" (peKARskii poROSHok) and разрыхлитель (razruiHLEETyel') (both of which I'm probably misspelling but I'm too tired from baking all day to look up). Anyway, the bottom line is that I found these two complicated words, AND remembered them, AND pronounced them correctly enough when I asked for baking powder in the store (after staring for fifteen minutes at the baking shelves without it suddenly appearing) that the lady understood me and was able to tell me that they didn't carry baking powder. So I loaded up on everything else, including three bags of powdered sugar, and marched home to look up a recipe for a cake that didn't require baking powder. Thankfully, my search was a success, and after a whispered consultation with my mom the cake queen via skype to check that the recipe sounded like a good one (whispered since Tom was in the next room), I waited until they had left for the hockey game, set out my ingredients, and started to bake.
Thankfully, the cake came out successfully, even sans baking powder, and I set out to make the chocolate frosting. I was using my mom's killer-good recipe: condensed milk, butter, chocolate chips, and powdered sugar. After I melted the first three on the stove, I opened up a bag of powdered sugar to pour in. But it looked weird in the bag...a bit grey rather than the bright white color I'm used to. So I stuck my finger in and put a bit on my tongue...and it definitely WASN'T powdered sugar. Apparently there is a third term for baking powder - кукурузный крахмал (kukuRUzni KRAHmal) - which is absolutely ridiculous - who needs three different ways to say "baking powder"?!? So there I was, with my chocolate all melted on the stove and no powdered sugar... did you know that you can make really good icing with half a tub of Nesquick powder, a tub of cream cheese, and some melted butter, chocolate, and condensed milk? I found that out today. So the cake is iced and decorated, and I even took a picture because I must admit I'm rather proud of my culinary creation, even though it didn't all go exactly as I'd planned. Now I just hope Tom likes it...and I hope I can find some use for the THREE BAGS of baking powder (not small bags, either!) that are currently sitting in my cupboard...
Well, that's all I have to report for now. Hope everyone has a good week!
OK, weather rant over now. Although I get the feeling it won't be the last... This was a really busy week. ...Oh, wow, my radiator just made a sound like a rocket taking off...that's a new one to add to the list of apartment sound effects. OK. Hope it doesn't blow up.
Anyway, as I was saying, this was a really busy week. I didn't get any new classes assigned, but all this extra stuff seemed to appear to fill up my spare time. Not that that's a bad thing...most of the extra stuff was a lot of fun. On Sunday, I had my thirteen-year-old neighbor Lilya over for tea. She's this really sweet girl who really wants to learn English - and she speaks it surprisingly well for her age - so we had a nice chat in English and Russian for several hours. It was fun - and it was also fun to play hostess - she was my first guest!
On Tuesday - which will no longer be my day off; now I will have Fridays off instead, hooray! (because Tuesday is just a weird day to have off) - I went walking in the forest park again, the one I posted pictures of several blogs ago. The weather was yet again wet, but instead of being cool this time it was downright cold. It was still beautiful, though - all the trees have turned to gold, and the birch grove was absolutely beautiful. The wind was blowing, and the sound of the rain pattering and the breeze shooshing through the branches and feeling the cold wind against my face and seeing the branches waving so gracefully - it was a wonderful peaceful moment. I might seem to be waxing ridiculously poetical in saying it, but birch trees are beautiful in the wind - maybe because they have such straight, striking white trunks but such gracefully drooping branches...anyway, I took a video of it, and even though it didn't turn out great the link is here so you can sort of get an idea if you want. I also had the idea of taking parallel pictures in all the different seasons of the same birch grove - it will be interesting to see how it changes.
I also had dance class on Tuesday and Friday night. Tuesday was hard - I'm only just starting to get back into shape now, and I have some corrections to work on...since I've been giving myself class all summer, there are some things I've let slip since there was no one to see and correct them, so now I have some catching up to do. It's all good, though. And Friday night was great - class was really enjoyable, and even better, I got to make friends with one of the ladies from the class. I wasn't sure if it would be possible to get to know anyone from the class very easily, because I was pretty sure they were all convinced I didn't speak Russian at all, since they know I'm a foreigner, and I'm not very confident about starting conversations in Russian yet. But Polina started a conversation with me in English, and it was so nice to get to know someone from the class! Now that I know one person, maybe it will be easier to get to know everyone else, too.
Last night was interesting because I went to a contact improv class with Lena. I had never heard of contact improv before coming here, but apparently it actually started in the States. It's a kind of dance that is all about the contact, both mental and physical, between two people as they improvise to music. Last night's class was focused on martial arts and tumbling techniques that can be used in contact improv, and Lena and I ended up being the only two people there - so we basically got a three-hour private! It was very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's my kind of dance. I'm so used to the idea of dance as being all about giving something of yourself to your audience - making them feel some sort of emotion and taking them out of the everyday world for a little while. But contact improv is not about your audience at all - it's all about the connection between you and your partner. It's a very unusual idea for me.
Today was eventful in that it is the day before Tom's birthday, so Laura, Sara, and I were all conspiring on how to get presents and such for him without him noticing. I volunteered to make a cake while the three of them went to a hockey game this afternoon, a mission which involved several deep dives into my Russian-English dictionary to figure out how to translate cake terms for an expedition to the grocery store - "baking soda" and "baking powder" were particularly crucial terms. Well, baking soda proved easy to find, but baking powder presented more of a challenge. I found two words for baking powder - "пекарский порошок" (peKARskii poROSHok) and разрыхлитель (razruiHLEETyel') (both of which I'm probably misspelling but I'm too tired from baking all day to look up). Anyway, the bottom line is that I found these two complicated words, AND remembered them, AND pronounced them correctly enough when I asked for baking powder in the store (after staring for fifteen minutes at the baking shelves without it suddenly appearing) that the lady understood me and was able to tell me that they didn't carry baking powder. So I loaded up on everything else, including three bags of powdered sugar, and marched home to look up a recipe for a cake that didn't require baking powder. Thankfully, my search was a success, and after a whispered consultation with my mom the cake queen via skype to check that the recipe sounded like a good one (whispered since Tom was in the next room), I waited until they had left for the hockey game, set out my ingredients, and started to bake.
Thankfully, the cake came out successfully, even sans baking powder, and I set out to make the chocolate frosting. I was using my mom's killer-good recipe: condensed milk, butter, chocolate chips, and powdered sugar. After I melted the first three on the stove, I opened up a bag of powdered sugar to pour in. But it looked weird in the bag...a bit grey rather than the bright white color I'm used to. So I stuck my finger in and put a bit on my tongue...and it definitely WASN'T powdered sugar. Apparently there is a third term for baking powder - кукурузный крахмал (kukuRUzni KRAHmal) - which is absolutely ridiculous - who needs three different ways to say "baking powder"?!? So there I was, with my chocolate all melted on the stove and no powdered sugar... did you know that you can make really good icing with half a tub of Nesquick powder, a tub of cream cheese, and some melted butter, chocolate, and condensed milk? I found that out today. So the cake is iced and decorated, and I even took a picture because I must admit I'm rather proud of my culinary creation, even though it didn't all go exactly as I'd planned. Now I just hope Tom likes it...and I hope I can find some use for the THREE BAGS of baking powder (not small bags, either!) that are currently sitting in my cupboard...
Well, that's all I have to report for now. Hope everyone has a good week!
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