You Must Be Mud.

The momentous day has come and I can reveal that the great thaw is upon us!  With milder days, a lack of ear whipping wind and some sneaky spells of sunshine, I think I’m starting to believe that we are seeing the back of the snow.  There is, however, a hell of a lot of snow still on the ground and Yaroslavl doesn’t do drainage. For this reason, I’ve found myself wading through huge slushy brown puddles and heaps of sandy mush deposited on every pavement.  There is thick mud everywhere. As much care as you may take walking along minding your own business, no Yaroslavl drivers spare a thought for passers-by as they speed through the mini lakes drenching anyone in the way.  This teamed with large amounts of water spilling off the roofs of buildings means that it’s going to be a fun month or so trying to keep dry.  I’m not too fussed about this though, because after all it’s all in the build up to spring, which will be more than welcome!

Before the thaw

I had a really good weekend actually, besides the heaps of work we keep getting from school.  Charlotte and I took a trip to one of the out of town shopping centres on Saturday.  It really is incredible, how effective a therapy shopping can be.  Cruising around clothes shops and seeking out an Accessorize was just what I needed to keep spirits high.  We also tend to have a lot of fun just laughing/despairing at various things on sale.  Charlotte coined a new phrase which I have to say can be applied to a great deal of things in this country: “When will that come up in life?” This basically speaks for everything we see, which is just completely nonsensical or pointless.  The clearest example of this on Saturday had to be the pair of sandle - trainers with a wedge heel. I can confirm that this will never come up in life, but let’s try and sell it anyway.

Yesterday Lucy and I went to Svetlana’s for a spot of Russian cookery.  We decided to try our hand at preparing traditional Russian ‘Pelmeni’.  ‘Pelmeni’ are like small boiled dumplings filled with meat, resembling tortellini.  They really are quite challenging to make though.  Once we had got the dough to the right elastic consistency, we had to fold them into shape without squidging out all the filling.  They looked quite impressive but the final verdict was that more attention needs to be paid to dough : meat ratio.  They were pretty dough heavy but for a first attempt, I can’t knock them.

Pelmeni pro at work

Here’s what I can knock. Apologies to any of my classmates who find themselves reading this drivel, as I’ve been harking on about it all day, but this was always going to make it into the blog.  I’ve had Natasha trying to palm off pancakes filled with baby food.  I kid you not, Natasha the culinary great has actually gone to the extremes of emptying a tin of meat puree intended for 1-year olds onto a pancake and she assures me that it is nothing out of the ordinary.  Here is a shining example of something that should never come up in life.  Sitting in the kitchen willing that plate of horrors to disappear, I’m gradually learning that anything is possible here.  Scraping cat poo out of the bath this morning before I had shower was something I had to take in my stride and I just have to keep telling myself that this will make me a good, well-rounded person.  A good, well-rounded person...

The finished article

I don’t have many plans for the week ahead, but I’ll continue teaching some of the little kids English at school.  It’s bad to have favourites, but I do: a kid called Vlad, who I think is about seven years old.  He wears a lime green roll-neck jumper complimented with a chequered tank top and snow trousers.  He is such a lad and is actually really enthusiastic about reading, which helps massively...even if he did spend the entire lesson burping. 

So there we go for another instalment of my colourful life in this nation of porridge, puddles and prune and chicken salad. Yes, the latter was inflicted upon me as well.  Bring on another week :).