Just Getting By . . .

When I told people I was going to Russia, the first question everyone asked is, "do you speak Russian?" Well, I speak no Russian at all and neither do 13 of my 14 American colleagues here. For all our scheduled activities we have interpreters. The real challenge is speaking to our host families. In my host family, Anya sometimes translates, but it is exhausing for her and she is sometimes not home. Galya and I actually manage to talk quite a bit. Galya knows a few words of English and when we combine that with my few words of Russian, we can get along. When that fails, we signal to each other. It's a very long game of charades. When all else fails, we get out the Russian-English dictionary and point to the words we want to use. We get by, but it's a little frustrating because we can't really have any serious conversations that way. Anya's father, Toli, just speaks to me in Russian and I speak back to him in English. We do not understand each other and are probably having two totally different conversations, but it's very pleasant anyway.

This is a photo of Sergei, my "host brother" and his nephew Grisha. Sergei is 25 and Grisha is 6. Grisha told me (Anya translating) that I was going to have to start speaking Russian because he cannot understand me when I speak English. If only it were that easy . . .










Here is a photo of me and Galya. I am modeling the apron and oven mitt that Galya gave me as a goodbye present, along with her recipe for cyrniki! It was sad to say goodbye to my family last night.Today we leave Vladimir to go to a smaller city called Murom. I do not know if I will be able to a access the internet from there, but I will try.