Bacon, Brahms, and a Baby Boy
OK, so we finally hit the required 6 comment mark on our last blog, so I feel free to post again. :) Actually, I had set myself a goal to have this done Definitely For Sure by Tuesday at the latest, but I guess I just got busy and didn't get it done.
Anyway, this is more like "blog-lite" this week due to the fact that we haven't had a lot going on here. Plugging away at our Russian studies (I got to dative case yesterday, so finally I can talk about giving people things and use other verbs that require an indirect object!), hanging out with friends, that about sums up the past week or so.
One important (and I stress the word "important" here) thing to happen to us is that I got a little hankering for some American food. We broke down and bought all the necessary ingredients to make bacon cheeseburgers and fries, as seen in the above picture. Yum! The bacon here is not the greatest (the greatest bacon in the world is in England), but overall you couldn't argue with the taste. Ultra yummy.
In other news, we didn't make it to family group on Sunday. Life without a car is overall a wonderful thing (although totally impossible in most of the US), but every once in a while it fools you. Sunday morning, as is our wont, we got all gussied up, rolled Steven up into a blanket burrito, and set off. However, we had gotten another 6 inches of snow Saturday night (and we've since added another four inches or so), and we didn't get very far with the stroller. By the time we had gone 100 meters, we realized we were running so late we would miss most of the meeting. We gave up and returned home. Seriously, pushing a stroller in the snow is like trying to use one on the beach. Short of physically picking it up and carrying it, there is just no way you're going anywhere.
It seems like such a simple thing to look out the window, realize that there's fresh snow on the ground, and pack Steven into a sled instead of the stroller, but we just didn't think of it. At least not until it was too late. Oh, well - I guess we'll know better next time.
Sunday night, though, I (J) got to have a nice experience. Some family friends were going to a concert at the Moscow Conservatory, where one of them had some sort of hookup to get us tickets for just $2! It was a fantastic experience, in one of the most famous classical music settings in Europe. The soloist was a famous violinist named Maksim something (maybe our violinist friend Abbie could identify him?), and they played several pieces from a composer whose name I didn't catch (we didn't have a program and the announcer lady spoke really quickly) and then a selection of Brahms. One of his more schizophrenic concertos (I think it was a concerto?) that changed moods rapidly and frequently, but I think we all agreed it was enjoyable and better than the first bit. Overall it was fun and a semi-rare bit of exposure to some "high culture" for your faithful narrator. 
I took a picture of some of the friends that came along for the concert: from left, our Californian friend Julie, our Asian friend Delia, and my language helper's mother Tatiana Aleksandrovna. They're standing in front of the statue of Tchaikovsky, for whom the Conservatory is named.
We're bringing back the What Is It™ feature for this blog only, except that it's more of a What Are They Doing™? Your mission is to interpret the below picture, which I took in the concert hall. Believe it or not, these people all have a common purpose and are working together. Put your guess in the comments, and as usual the correct answer earns a point in our ongoing contest.
