The Rumors are True - I'm Still Alive...

Argh. Blogger just ate the start of this post. So, to recap, Hi, I'm here, I'm sorry it's been a while, and is H going emo, because I need to know if I should start looking for recipes.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Ours was probably the most traditional non-traditional set-up I've been to. The university provided turkeys (which actually turned out to be of decent size) and some other bits, the weirdest of which was definitely the random inclusion of tuna. We pot-lucked the rest - most of the boys couldn't be compelled to cook, so they brought drinks, Lindsey managed to prepare a tub (literally- think RubberMaid) of stuffing, there were some vegtables, Laura managed pumpkin pie, and I made PinkStuff.

The actual name is GreenStuff, since when the recipe is followed correctly, the end result is a pale green. However, as I think everyone cooking discovered, trying to find ingredients in a foreign country is kind of complicated. I couldn't find pistachio pudding, so I substituted strawberry and I ended up crushing whole canned strawberries instead of having crushed pineapple. I'm really glad my hozhaika wasn't home while I was cooking, since she probably would've been kind of alarmed. I couldn't find a can opener (I found a few things that looked like can openers, but none of them would open the can...), so I found something sharp-ish and physically pounded an opening in the can. I'm sporting a nice gash on my finger from that. Then, I was substituting whipped cream from a can in place of CoolWhip, and the stuff wasn't gelling - it really kind of looked like soup. I ended up running out to another grocery store (my third-ish of the day) and buying more whipped cream. Final count, there were 3.5 cans of whipped cream in the dish (it was a double recipe, at least). But everyone really liked it, and I took home a dish licked clean, so all was well.

Thursday's cooking adventures also included long periods of time spent on various buses, since I never did find the original grocery store I was hunting. Part of the problem was my unwillingness to stay on the bus too long, since I'd already had a bus adventure on Wednesday night. You see, Wednesday, I went to English class with Sasha (son in host family) as a token exciting native English-speaker. More on that in a second. The class went on after my bit, so Sasha told me the numbers to get a bus going home. No problem, right? I've got the bus thing down. Except almost all of the buses home were marshutkas - essentially, a large yellow van that you have to tell when you want to get off. Not my cup of tea. So being my stubborn self, I decide to wait for the single bus that's supposed to run home. This resolve lasts until everyone else has left the stop and I'm freezing to death. Thus, I hop on a marshutka. However, I managed to screw up the numbers and climb aboard the wrong marshutka, which then proceeds to take me not home. I recognized where I was when I finally managed to get off, but it was a ways from home, so I went to wait at the bus stop for a real bus to take me back. The cold won again, as every bus that stopped was going elsewhere, so I gave in and walked. And thus it took me an hour to get home, when the direct walk is about 25 minutes. By the time I got home, my general reaction was, "I want America."

The English class was, um, interesting, if that's the phrase one uses to describe being simultaneously hit on by multiple teenage Russian boys. It was basically a question and answer session about me, the United States, and a foreigner's perception of Russia. Questions ranged from "Do you know any Russian? Say something!" (a. No, it's not like I'm studying it or anything, and b. way to put me on the spot. Thanks.) to "Do you know anything about Russian history?" (at which point I forgot everything I'd ever studied) to "What do you think of Russian-made goods? How do their quality and pricing compare to what you're used to?" (um, the chocolate's good?) on the normal end. Highlights of the weirder side include "Do you have a boyfriend? Do you want one?" (Creeper.) and "Describe your ideal man" (Not you). The overall vibe was pretty good, though, and the teacher did apologize that the boys were young and whatnot. Her English was kind of interesting; one of the other Americans teaches evening English classes and she's complained that the book encourages the use of crutch words to help speech sound more fluent, and that's exactly what the teacher did. Her favorite word was "well", but she'd insert it in places where it didn't make sense with the flow of the sentence. Definitely interesting.

So I'm really impressed if you're still with me after all that. Hopefully that's enough reading material for now, since I'm tired of typing. I come home in 4 weeks! Miss you all!