Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Uncategorized category.
Beetroot cake …
Beetroot and chocolate cake rather excitingly tastes of really moist chocolate cake. Just think of all the good it must be doing you having so much beetroot in (ignore the fact that you’ve boiled and then baked them for so long that most of the vitamins have gone – at least that’s what Paul reckons) Find the recipe on the Riverford website and hurray for sudo-healthy cakes.
I ate this for breakfast every day last week and have just made another one today. The luminous pink colour of the beetroot mix when you blend it is just so pleasing. Disappointingly the cake actually comes out chocolate colour but still …
NYC baby!
Full of iconic images and famous views, New York City lived up to all expectations. The kind of place that until you arrive there you don’t realise that a bizarre part of you only believed it existed on TV and in films. A perfect blue sky for the views from the Empire State building and Statue of Liberty, yellow cabs aplenty, a fabulous run in Central park-resisting the urge to run like Phoebe from friends, Starbucks overload, lights of Times square, Hairspray, the hysterical Avenue Q, bagels and cream cheese. It was fabulous!
Fluent
A list of English words I can say in Russian: (no cyrillic alphabet skill I’m afraid)
delicious, blue, red, green, yellow, black, white, purple, orange, pink, needle, yes, no, goodbye, my God is so big, so strong and so mighty!, tea, milk, one, two, three, four, good day, come on!
What more could you need?
Kwas o’clock
A word must surely be said for Paul’s Kwas obsession. A bizarre drink that was everywhere in Russia, made from ‘various grades of bread’ as it was described on one menu. Smells like treacle, tastes like non-alcoholic, flat, sweet beer. It’s always under 1% though so you would need to drink a lot of it…
Epic Train journey
After we finished running the summer camps- 4 days for the younger children and 5 days for the older ones – we embarked on our epic train journey to Moscow. It took us 29hours by train and we had second class with services tickets that I had bought from realrussia.com before we left. The cabin was slightly cramped but fine for us as the four of us shared one cabin. We boarded at 1.24am Friday night and after a few beers and celebratory vodkas we slept our first night on the train. 
As night trains go this was one of the most confortable I have ever slept on. The cabin had erratic air conditioning which did keep it quite cool and we all slept really well both nights, especially compared to sleeping two weeks on a sofa bed for me and Paul!
The day time was taken up with making copious cups of tea from the scalding hot urn that was kept boiling at the end of each carriage (bring a mug), reading, playing cards in the retro buffet car, making cheese and tomato wraps from the huge supplies of food we had bought with us. There was a certain amount of cabin fever which saw Paul offering the hawkers balloons he had blown up in order to get rid of them causing a few strange looks although I women seemed really grateful.
We travelled through the Ukraine which was fine on the way in (Paul even broke my no-one leaves the train at stops rule to put one foot in on the Ukraine) but slightly more complicated on the way out when they were reluctant to let us back into Russia on our single entry visa. We managed to persuade the typically Russianly un-friendly boarder guard that we hadn’t got off the train so hadn’t really been into the Ukraine at all. we did score four extra passport stamps though so bonus!
It did take us about 20 hours of detective work to figure out how to work the taps. We were convinced there was no running water until Paul solved the mystery of the taps. You have to put your hand under the tap and push up rather than down and completely ignore the two twisty tap looking things!
So Russian trains – good for a couple of days, excellent nights sleep, better if you know everyone in the cabin (although first class has only 2 per cabin if you could afford it) , take a mug and some food even though it tells you food is included and enjoy the trip appreciating the sheer size of the country!
Here we are at 6.48am Sunday on the platform. Finally we had made it to Moscow:
Sewing, sewing and more sewing
We had a lot of fun organising activities for the children who came to our summer camp – sometimes with the approval of the Russian teachers and translators and sometimes without! The first week the children were younger and we did a lot of singing and games with them which went down well. They were enthustiastic about most things and many of they virtually climbing in top of me in their urgency to start cross stitching every morning. I did an hour of sewing with a different group each day and they others took charge of glass painting, tag rugby and country dancing.
Russia Review
We have actually returned from our Russia adventure now and due to lack of web access when we were staying with someone for most of the two weeks and also partly due to my own laziness I haven’t written much about it so I shall attempt to blog about some of the main tales from the trip in sequence now. (Although I know thats not really the point of a blog but hey!)
So first tip of interest to anyone who might travel to Russia was the bizarre airport transfer system. We flew in on a flight from Heathrow to Moscow Sheremetevo where we needed to change to a domestic flight to Krasnodar in the South of Russia. There was a tiny transit desk where they seemed less than impressed about our creased e-ticket that we had printed out but eventually presetned us with boarding passes. Then a long wait at the passport desk and then then most strange part where the only direction available seemed to be down the stairs to a back door where a few people stood smoking. No signs -Russian or English, no offical looking exit. So we just stood and waited and I took the strategy of standing close to people in order to see their boarding cards until I found someone on the same flight as us to follow. We were then ushered onto a bus for a 15min trip round the outskirts of the airport until we reached the domestic terminal and things became a little more self explanatory again!
From Somerset to Heathrow to Moscow to Krasnodar and then a three hour drive to Armavir we arrived at last to meet our hosts – who initially it appeared didn’t quite know what to do with us!
How many crafty items will fit in my bag?
So since we are leaving for Russia in a few days we thought we better try and get a little bit organised this week. We’ve made a vague timetable of activities that we want to do with the kids and are trying to ignore the main things people keep asking us which we don’t know the answer to like: How much English will they speak? and where are you going to stay?!
Monday morning had Paul, Julia and I walking round with a huge box of all the cash we have raised (£750 -pretty good going really) and buying stack loads of craft and sports stuff. People were most interested in what we were doing that required 16 pots of dye and 4 sets of glass paints among other things. We could probably set up a haberdashery shop with the amount of sewing stuff and material that we have bought now so the only problem is going to bo how to fit it all in our bags!
