In 2020, because we couldn't go out to eat and lacked the forethought to order through Amazon the number of weeks in advance it would have required to be timely, we celebrated my birthday around a fire pit eating Georgian khachapuri delivered to the Embassy compound. For Douglas's birthday, I baked him an apple pie. Our anniversary was spent watching a movie and eating a 'special' dinner of take-out burritos and chili soup from the American Diner in the Embassy. For Thanksgiving, I found some deli-sliced turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberries and one box of Stove Top stuffing that we ate on opposite sides of the apartment while Douglas finished a quarantine after a trip to Vladivostok.
I was determined to have a festive Christmas.
The yolka in the parking lot of our apartment in Yekaterinburg. Yolka translates as Christmas tree, but it's more of a New Year's tree, since the Russians celebrate the new year with a decorated tree.
Then we were bundled off to Yekaterinburg where they needed Douglas to serve as management officer and act as post security officer. One job just isn't enough for some people in the eyes of their superiors, two or three are better. "Just bear with me during this and throw some food my way." Douglas told me just before his head sunk into his computer and he disappeared.
A detail from the yolka in the parking lot.
I try to maximize trips to the grocery store and only go once a week to avoid exposure to the coronavirus. Society's mouth-breathers have been thoughtful enough to make themselves obvious by leaving their noses hanging out over their masks as they walk around cloaked in their entitlement, so I can usually avoid them. I speak enough Russian to get by at the grocery store - I don't have to flap my arms or rudely squeeze myself if I want chicken or milk. (I don't think you want to know about the time I had to buy tampons while living in Germany.) Our oven here is about a third the size of a standard American home oven, so turkey is out of the question. Maybe a couple Cornish game hens cooked one at a time. For the most part, for Christmas dinner I stuck to things I knew. But I also wanted brown sugar. There's plenty of brown sugar on the shelves here, but there's no molasses in it. It's not unusual for me to draw a small crowd when I shop. It usually takes two or three to confer, read labels and figure out exactly what it is I want. I am grateful for the patience of the Russian people. I found brown sugar at the fifth store I visited - dark brown! Since I'm on the topic of sugar, you know the difference between regular granulated sugar and baker's sugar? Well, double or triple the size of the grains of our regular sugar and you have the only sugar available here. You must allow extra time for the sugar to dissolve when making everything or everything crunches.
So, our dinner of sautéed peppers, onions and zucchini with rice and salmon was colorful and delicious. But we had no Christmas decorations. Wait. Not true. My dear mother send me one of those cardboard Advent calendars with the chocolates hidden behind each window. We gave it a prominent place on our couch and surrounded it with gifts from Douglas's co-workers.
These are our Christmas decorations for 2020. The picture of the young women is a Peace Corps calendar with photographs take by volunteers around the world.
I'm not crazy-busy like Douglas, but there is plenty to do to fill my days, even when it's not Christmastime. When we're living as we are (so-called temporarily), we are provided with what are called welcome kits which are made up of the bare minimum of household supplies: four each of bowls, plates and utensils, popsicle sticks that somehow pass as knives, kitchen shears that can barely cut lettuce, burlap towels, blankets that are made of some sort of rubbery material, 14" mattresses with fitted sheets made for 8" mattresses, etc. and I am grateful for these welcome kits. Really. But to leave behind Wusthof knives and have to wash dishes twice a day to have something clean to eat off of is taxing. Then there's the laundry. Our washer and dryer are each large enough for about three bath towels, so it must be done often. The units came with no instruction manuals. The dials for the washer have pictures:
In case you're wondering what all the Russian means, briefly: beside the picture of the pants, it says jeans'; beside the picture of the shirt, it says 'shirts.' You get it. I have deliberated for many minutes when I stand before it with a pair of pants and a shirt I want to launder.
The dryer is no clearer. Your choices include iron-dry, shelf-dry, closet-dry and very dry. Most cycles for each last well over an hour and a half.
Okay, back to the holidays. I've mentioned before that New Year is the big holiday in Russia. Christmas is more of a church holy day.
I wanted sparkling wine for toasting the new year. This was challenging since I don't know Russian wines (she writes as though she knows American wines or Italian wines). It was further complicated by the fact that I'd forgotten to bring my reading glasses, so I couldn't make out сухое (dry) or сладкий (sweet) which usually appears in very small print on the back label. (Reading microscopic English is hard enough, but to make out the Cyrillic alphabet is just too much.) I did, however find a брют (brut) for P295 (295 rubles, about $4). Pretty cheap. I was suspicious. Well, I thought, maybe this is the two-buck-Chuck of Russia; maybe it's not so bad. I took it. There was another bottle nearer the checkout for P495 (about $5.35), so I figured I could afford that as a back-up.
Fireworks are popular here, perhaps from the proximity to China, I don't know. So there were intermittent fireworks all night New Year's Eve. They aren't very spectacular, not that I've seen, but they're beloved. In Vladivostok, they were a regular occurrence all year round.
Douglas ended 2020 with the receipt of some very good news, news I'm not allowed to share yet. That's your teaser to read next month's blog.
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