Beside the Stream

I got back Friday night and spent Saturday harvesting the onions, corn and tomatoes.  I made chicken soup, three peach cobblers, and we did our first run of cider on Sunday, from picking to clean-up.  I was supposed to edit photos last night, but I ended up going to bed instead.  So I’m up early this Monday to try and show you what it was like for a breakfast at a nice lady’s house in Uglich. 

We went by boat from Saint Petersberg to Moscow, and Uglich is an old city near Moscow.  The city is industrialized, and the air is acrid with some nasty pollutant… from a tire factory?  oil processing? It’s pungent.   

She lived in a compound of perhaps six apartment blocks with a playground in the middle. 

A couple of things in this photo are standard: absolutely no litter.  No graffiti.  No flowers.  And no kids. 

We were 12 around a table, and she served hot cereal first, and then a stack of blinis with homemade jam and condensed milk.  And vodka.  Our hostess is a nurse, earning $125 a month.  Her rent is $20 a month, and her husband is a pensioner.  We arrived at 8AM, so she must have started cooking around 6.   I ate a lot of blinis and jam. 

When we were through eating, she turned on the radio and picked up her tambourine.

Can you see how nice she is?  She’s paid to have tourists to breakfast. 

She cooked, we ate and drank, so it must be a party. 

And it was. 

The man on the left is her husband, who went walking when we were there. 

We were told on the boat that the current life expectancy for Russian men is 58 years, and 40% of the government income is from the sale of vodka.  This wide-angle lens makes everything look good, but it’s grim here. 

Two days later we were at Kruschev’s grave, and two men made photos of themselves pounding a sneaker on the gravestone.

Kruschev’s children and grandchildren are Americans, the USSR is no more, and American men still tap the soles of their (Chinese-made) shoes on his grave.  You can’t make this stuff up.