Hi. It's early April 2023 and I finally got access to this blog after being locked out for... a long time.
I found this post in my drafts and am deciding to hit publish exactly ten years later. If anyone's randomly reading me... Enjoy!
Pelayo and I visited Moscow in March of 2013 during our spring break. It's taken me a while to sit down and write about the trip due to how overwhelming amount of things I wanted to write and tell you all about!
I guess I'll start out where any Minnesotan would start... the weather. It was perfect to see Moscow, as the Spaniards say, "En su salsa,'' or ''In it's sauce.'' In other words- covered in snow. What is Moscow without fur coats and hats and Russian bombshells walking over a thick coat of ice on a cobblestone road in stiletto heels? If Russia is in your future, head over in early springtime. Snowy but not below zero.
We were lucky with the weather, it was a snowy and comfortable approximate 32 degrees for the entire week we were there. The strangest thing about this weather was that public places and homes were extremely over-heated. Extremely! We went into a number of shopping malls to use the bathroom or to walk around and it was excessively hot. It was immediate strip down to bottom layer and sweat it out kinda heat. Weird. Kind of like America and the over-doing of air conditioning I suppose. Another weird fact? Last summer a number of people in Moscow died of heat stroke. Who ever would have thought...
Anyway, onto my second favorite theme: food. The food in Moscow was mediocre, at best. They take potato salad to a whole new level. Lunch buffets consist of a very large number of different varieties of potato salad, all sprinkled with dill. Dill is a whole other topic. They topped dried dill on just about everything you can imagine. The tastiest thing entering my belly that week were these little air-filled dumplings bathed in sour cream and sprinkled, of course, with dill. Second best would be cabbage soup- and as you can all imagine how mediocre even the best cabbage soup could be... well... you got it. And, after a week of dill topped everything, on the last day, we succumbed to a hipster bar for lunch and had some nachos. And the salsa was flavored with... dill ladies and gentlemen, dill.
I guess I'll start out where any Minnesotan would start... the weather. It was perfect to see Moscow, as the Spaniards say, "En su salsa,'' or ''In it's sauce.'' In other words- covered in snow. What is Moscow without fur coats and hats and Russian bombshells walking over a thick coat of ice on a cobblestone road in stiletto heels? If Russia is in your future, head over in early springtime. Snowy but not below zero.
We were lucky with the weather, it was a snowy and comfortable approximate 32 degrees for the entire week we were there. The strangest thing about this weather was that public places and homes were extremely over-heated. Extremely! We went into a number of shopping malls to use the bathroom or to walk around and it was excessively hot. It was immediate strip down to bottom layer and sweat it out kinda heat. Weird. Kind of like America and the over-doing of air conditioning I suppose. Another weird fact? Last summer a number of people in Moscow died of heat stroke. Who ever would have thought...
Anyway, onto my second favorite theme: food. The food in Moscow was mediocre, at best. They take potato salad to a whole new level. Lunch buffets consist of a very large number of different varieties of potato salad, all sprinkled with dill. Dill is a whole other topic. They topped dried dill on just about everything you can imagine. The tastiest thing entering my belly that week were these little air-filled dumplings bathed in sour cream and sprinkled, of course, with dill. Second best would be cabbage soup- and as you can all imagine how mediocre even the best cabbage soup could be... well... you got it. And, after a week of dill topped everything, on the last day, we succumbed to a hipster bar for lunch and had some nachos. And the salsa was flavored with... dill ladies and gentlemen, dill.
