Notes from Aboveground: Как трудно быть самостоятельной (It's hard to be independent)

Surprise! It's another blog post.

It's now been almost a week since my family left and I've been fending for myself meal-wise. This would probably be hard in any city (as I've not done it before), but in a place without many of the groceries I'm familiar with, it's quite a challenge.

In a mixture of laziness and lack of courage in the grocery stores (there are 3 less than a block from my building), I've been mostly eating eggs with cheese and tomatoes mixed in for dinner. I did buy some chicken breasts a couple days ago, but I have yet to figure out Russian spices and thus haven't been brave enough to try cooking them. The stifling heat recently hasn't helped either. Russian bread and пряники have also become staples of my admittedly vitamin-lacking diet. I'm really going to make an effort to do better this week.

Perhaps I should explain. There are a few standards of the stuff I cook at home that I've been unable to buy here. First, spices, etc: salt was obvious, though I'm still not sure which type I ended up with. Flour and baking powder are also found in abundance, but I don't plan on making anything that involves them (too complex). Things I still haven't found: pepper (not in little ball form), baking soda ("soda" here seems to refer to the powder--yes Mom, I DO know the difference)--which I wouldn't cook with but would be useful for cleaning. Vanilla extract and cinammon are also sadly absent, but easier to live without than pepper. Needless to say, I haven't even tride to find more exotic spices.

The worst thing, though, is fruit and vegetables. There's some mysterious scale system used to weigh the products and thus price them, which the buyer is supposed to do before going to checkout. The problem is, though all the Russian seem to know how it works, I'm as yet too intimidated by the notorious "public face" of the Russian public to ask someone to explain it to me. For now I'll stick to canned peas and carrots.

The other option for fruits (and a limited number of vegetables) is the stands that can be found all over the city. The problem there is that most of them sell everything except the stuff I'd actually like to buy. Though it does tend to look fresher than the stuff in the store. I may work up the courage this week for a visit to the market a couple kilometers away (where a professor took us on a field trip in March). We'll see, haggling with people who are either very dismissive of foreigners or are immigrants themselves and don't speak Russian very well is not really an attractive prospect to me.

As a bonus, here are some photos I've taken since my return:

Moscow: