The Latest
Cmeпaн Дж-bич (Stepan J-vich - "Steven son of J" in Russian) in all his glory. He's starting to become quite the crawler, and has added pulling himself up to a standing position (which is usually followed by crashing to the floor when he loses his balance) to his repertoire. He also said his first word, "Dada" the other day. I looked at him when he was babbling while lying on the bed and said "Steven, can you say 'Dada'?" To my surprise, he looked right at me and said "Dada!" I wasn't sure if it wasn't just a coincidental babble, so I asked him again, and sure enough, he came right back with "Dada!" I'm pretty sure he doesn't connect the word with me, but he did repeat it, at least. Anyway, on to the regular content!
Many moons ago, when we first began to blog, we had stated that it was our intention to post something roughly once a week. If one were to look through our past history, one might notice that this lofty goal has not been something we've lived up to by any stretch of the word "weekly." However, with this post, a mere 7 days after our last one, we have one of the rare exceptions. And it's not so much an issue of so much happening in our lives as it is of me being here on an afternoon with nothing else to do and a reliable internet connection. This week we've managed to exceed our targets for language study, and thus an afternoon at friends' was in order.
That said, what have we done in the past week? The pics follow:
Actually, this took the day before our last post (or somewhere thereabouts), but I didn't have room for it in our last post. One of our adventures here was a trip to Red Square on the Russian Independence Day (from the USSR) to see the proceedings. As it turned out, the promised parade did not materialize, but they did have what seemed to be a graduation ceremony from the local ROTC. The mayor of Moscow spoke, they were awarded medals of some sort, and then it was over. If you look closely, the orange bricks in the background are part of the Kremlin wall.
Also since our last post, we got to have a picnic with the team in one of the local parks. One thing I have to say in Moscow's favor - there are a lot of great parks. For a city of 12 million, you'd never know it when you go into the middle of one of these things where all you can see is trees. I've never seen a city with so many of them, or such nice ones. The park we picnicked in has a couple of ponds, a series of gardens, gazebos, and pathways through the woods. 
Today we took our first trip to the local "Wal-mart." Actually, for any of you who knew B in the US, you know how much she likes used clothes stores. Well, last week we had an "incident" with our laundry (B washed a rag from the guest apartment with our clothes, which looked old and thus she assumed it had been washed before; however, apparently this assumption was wrong). Short version is that all of our clothes are a lovely shade of pink. While this really isn't an issue for most of B's clothes or things like boxer shorts, I'd have to say that pinkish-grey is not really my color. Here, however, was our salvation - used T-shirts for $10 a kilo! I picked out three for the tidy sum of $8, and B got a couple of things as well.
I don't have a picture of this, but yesterday I also got to attend a Spanish Club meeting here in Moscow with our Russian teacher, who is learning Spanish. I even met someone else from Bolivia (!), but most of the attendants were Russians who either teach or study Spanish in some form. We ate shashlik (halfway between barbeque and shishkebabs), played some volleyball, sang songs in Spanish, and generally did our best to converse. It was neat for me to speak Spanish for a while, but I did keep getting confused with all the Russian that's now floating around in my head. The main point of the exercise (for me, at least) was to make some new Russian friends, which I was definitely able to do. I got a lot of chances to practice my Russian with new folks, which was ... interesting. I made a lot of mistakes, but everyone was patient, and it was definitely fun.
In last week's edition of What is it For?™, we have a slightly easier entry than last week, though not much less surprising. Actually, the question here is more What Are They Doing?™, so the challenge is to guess what these folks who we saw on a recent trip to the park are up to. You might have to click on the picture to see it better; B blanched at the idea of walking up to some guy in a Speedo and taking his picture, so this is a cutout of the actual picture she took, which had me in the foreground to conceal her real purpose.
Congratulations to last week winner: Joy "Mystery Woman" Sleep, who recognized the battered metal box as a stand-alone garage. They seem too small to get a car into to me, and yet that is actually what they're for. Some are a little bigger than the one we put on the blog, but that size does work for the European-size cars some people drive here.
