Breakfast in Volgograd

- This is Vovik; Olga's uncle and a very gregarious fellow to say the least!


- Brad and Andreas on a Lenin Statue in Vologograd

- Truly an amazing Statue. She is called Mama Kurgan. She is about 50 feet high and is absolutely stunning.

- The bride and groom.

- Danika, Brad and myself with the fast talking, hard drinking grandparents of Olga


So little time has passed since my last update, but so much has happened...where to begin, where to begin...

Let's start with an update on the baggage situation, as I know you all have been chewing your nails in complete distress about the fact that poor little TK had no clean clothes to wear. Well, you can all take deep breath and sigh with relief, because we have been happily re-united with our backpacks. Mine showed up after 24 hours; Brad's must have REALLY liked London, because it decided to hang out there for an extra day and only showed up on Friday. But, whew! What a relief it was to see the bag when it finally arrived:)

Now that you can stop worrying about our clothing situation, we can move on to stories about our time in Volgograd. (As I think I mentioned before, we were there for our friends Olga and Andreas' wedding.) Volgograd, as many of you history buffs out there will know, was formerly Stalingrad, and was the site of one of the most sigificant battles of WWII. (Go watch 'Enemy at the Gates' if you don't know what I'm talking about). The museum of the battle of Stalingrad was fascinating! But, what was arguably more fascinating was our visit with Olga's family.

We were staying at Olga's grandparents' apartment as they were out at their dacha*. It was very nice, as far as Krhuschev era apartment blocks go... which is only about 2 feet...but still, it was, of course, very generous of them to let us stay there. We got there late Thursday night. On Friday we toured around the city and the wedding was on Saturday. We didn't plan to get up too early on Saturday, as we didn't have to meet the family to head off to the wedding until about 10. As I've mentioned, it was just me, Brad and Danika at the apartment because the grandparents were at the dacha. We were told they were planning to come to the wedding, but had no need to come to the apartment. So, needless to say, we were not expecting them, let alone at 7 o'clock on Saturday morning. Nevertheless, 7 am saw them ringing the doorbell about 15 times until we woke up and stumbled to the door to let them in.

Initial communcations did not go smoothly as our Russian is a bit rusty (having barely used it for 3 years...), and we were still half asleep, and it was 7 am, and the grandparents were old and had no teeth (all gold fillings; very bizzare) so they were a wee bit difficult to understand! Good times indeed. Things got better when they decided to make us breakfast. They put out the fancy china and nice tea cups and nice crystal glasses and served us bread with caviar, which Brad and I, being vegetarian, couldn't eat. (Not that Bababushka &Dedushka** could grasp the concept of vegetarianism; I think they just thought we were weird foriegners on some kind of no-caviar diet). They then offered us red wine to drink...

Sure, we said, it's 8 am,we're eating breakfast; seems like the perfect time for a nice glass of Soviet era red wine... They poured the wine for me and Danika, and then Deduskha asked Brad if he'd like to try some 'white'. Assuming by 'white' he meant white wine, Brad said sure, why not. Then old, Russian, Dedushka, type person breaks out a bottle of room temperature vodka, pours himself and Brad a glass full each - note: this is not a shot glass, this is a nice, large, cut cyrstal glass. Brad, not accustomed to drinking full glasses of luke warm vodka at 8 am, cautiously sipped at the vodka. Deduska, however, preceeded to pound back the glass of vodka in one quick shot while Brad, Danika and I stared in amazement, checked our watches; yup - still 8 am! To make it even better, the Babuskha pounded back her full glass of horrific red wine at the same speed and then started to pick on me and Danika for not drinking fast enough! It was a very, very surreal start to our morning.

The rest of the day was very nice and comparatively normal. We got on a bus with all Olga's ever so friendly family and drove out to the River Volga (very big, very famous river in southern Russia) and went on an afternoon long cruise along the river. The boat docked for a few hours on a lovely white sand beach where we played soccer - I scored the winning goal for my team; very proud was I! - and suntanned and stuff like that. On the cruise back to the pier, we had a nice wedding dinner and drank lots and lots and lots and lots of vodka, beer, champagne, etc, etc, toasting the happy couple. All very nice indeed. On Sunday we flew back to Moscow, where we will play tourist for a couple of days.



Our next adventure will be the over-night train to Petersburg on Tuesday and I will try to make sure something entertaining happens so I can tell you all about it.

Later all
TK

*dacha = summer cottage for Russians
** Babushka & Deduska = Grandmother & Grandfather