Buttercup, Nutella, and many, many walnuts..

On Sunday, we were supposed to go to Sasha’s for breakfast, as she is house-sitting and looking after Dima and Vika while Katya is away with Yura and the first form in Kitezh for the week. However, Arina came to tell us that because one of the cow’s was giving birth, we were to have breakfast with her instead (Sasha is in charge of the farm). We had a really nice breakfast there, partly because we got to eat Nutella for the first time in ages! So good! Anyway, after that, we decided to visit the farm to see the newly born calf. When we arrived, lots of the kids were already there helping out, and they immediately gave us a slip of paper each to write a name down for the calf. I checked to see if they wanted it in English or Russian, but they said English was fine, so I wrote down Buttercup. Sasha then chose one of the names that we’d all written down in a raffle, and she picked out mine! I was very happy, and luckily I’d looked up the translation for buttercup a few days before, when Lois had found one on our walk to the river, so I was able to explain that buttercup was ‘Лютик’ (Lyootik) in Russian. So now this baby cow has two names!



Buttercup!

We then were invited by Katya and Vika for a birthday tea in honour of Buttercup, and so they prepared cheese on toast and tea etc for us, in a way that I don’t think many 10 year olds in the UK could do! We were then joined by Sasha, who put on one of her favourite Russian comedy films for us, which was about this guy who invented basically a time machine, and accidentally lets Ivan the Terrible through into his time. Even though I didn’t understand all of it, it was pretty funny. She then invited us for a late lunch, so, after checking on Buttercup, we made mini pizzas. We then had to leave straight away to get cooking our dinner for 12! It was a little bit stressful, and it turned out there were no leeks, so we had to use onions instead, but somehow we managed to serve up a dinner almost on time, which was eaten by almost everyone. We had wine, and Masha gave us a toast, which was embarrassing, but really nice! The kids were all drinking this drink which was a mixture of water and jam (I watched Masha prepare it), which sounds disgusting, so I had to try it, and it was actually really nice! It wouldn’t work with English jam though, Russian jam is much more runny. All the kids disappeared before we could serve the apple pie, so we were worried that it wouldn’t all be eaten, but luckily some guests turned up, who, although they’d brought their own cake, all had a piece of our’s, and said it was really good. We also took some to Sasha, Vika and Dima as a thank you for lunch, only they weren’t there, so we left them a note with it. Lena forced us to take some of the huge amount of walnuts that they now have in Orion – they’re fresh from the Caucasus, and I think they bought about 700 kilos, so every available container, including bins, are full of walnuts. I thought I’d try one again, but, as I thought, I really don’t like them! So now we have a big container full, but Lois doesn’t think they’re worth the effort to open either…..!

At the community meeting, Masha thanked us again for dinner, and Sasha, Vika and Dima were very grateful for the pie we left them, so it was all good! The recipe for the pie is on the BBC Good Food website, and I really recommend it because it was so good.

We’ve been even busier this week as we’ve had to cover Sasha’s classes as she is very busy on the farm. Today, I had to look after the kindergarten for 2 hours, only to then return a few hours later for the hour and half lesson with them. However, they were pretty good today, but maybe that’s because half of them weren’t there! We also had what we thought were Jaffa Cakes at Tamara’s house, only to discover they were in fact raspberry flavour.

Lois quest for trying strange Russian drinks continues, we’ve had bark juice, apple and peach juice, cherry juice, and now a tarragon flavoured drink, which is a luminous green colour. Russia is amazing…!



Some strange drinks…

And we have now been here for 5 weeks already!