Diet No. 5

At the health hotel we had Diet No. 5. Pictured here is a typical breakfast.

A Russian breakfast may be similar to supper. You'll notice a cup of tea, a tomato and cucumber salad, an omelet and mashed potatoes. (A Russian omelet is made with lots of milk and is therefore almost a custard.)

Side dishes include tvoroznik (a baked pudding with farmer's cheese), a small plate of oatmeal, a pastry, and red caviar for buttered bread. We could have had boiled chicken or a meat cutlet instead of the omelet. In any case, you can see that there was plenty of food to last us until dinner -- which is in the middle of the day.

A Russian dinner starts with zakuski, or appetizers, which often include vegetable or meat salads. There's also kielbasa, cheese, bread, and a soup course. The main course here will be boiled meat or chicken or baked fish, served on a small plate with mashed potatoes.

The dinner drink at the health hotel is always either kompote, a sweetened beverage made with a few berries or softened dried fruit, or kisel, which tastes somewhat like liquid Jello.

Supper is similar to breakfast. At the health hotel we usually get something to take back to our rooms for a late night snack. Fresh fruit, perhaps. Or kefir to drink (look for kefir in the dairy section of your grocery store; it's similar to buttermilk or drinkable yogurt.)

Diet No. 5 is a generic one here, probably what most people get. There are to be no fried foods. Meat is boiled, braised, or baked. Soups are made with vegetarian broth. Nobody gets seconds, although each portion is small.

One day a tablemate of ours ate our servings of the first course before we arrived. The waitress was indignant, for she had to replace our setting. The guy never tried that trick again!

Slava is a big eater, although a careful one. He needs to have a large stash of fruit around for snacking. So some afternoons we went foraging. From an Armenian couple on the street we bought some grapes and a watermelon. At the central market Slava got plums and peaches. He got pears from a wild orchard we found on a hike.

There's one important food group virtually missing from Diet No. 5. That is coffee. On our first day I asked about coffee at breakfast, and was told that I could have it the next day, which was Tuesday. The next morning I got one packet of instant cafe-au-lait with sugar. I got another one the following Tuesday. I learned that coffee was served only on Tuesdays.

Fortunately I had come prepared for such a situation. I had packed a bag of ground coffee with single cup filters. In a land of tea drinkers, I knew that I might have to be responsible for my own welfare.

Do clients lose weight on Diet No. 5? Not likely. I'll have some remedial work to do in the United States.

A Russian Recipe

Photo of our kitchen in E-burg

After "Food Safety Alerts," published below, I'd like to talk about cooking at home.  In the heat of summer, it’s nice to have a cold soup for lunch.

A Russian favorite is called Okroshka, and it is with pleasure that I share this recipe with you. Note that the quantity of each ingredient is left to your discretion.

OKROSHKA SOUP
Boiled potatoes, diced
Boiled egg, diced
Cucumber, peeled and diced
Green onion, chopped
Fresh dill, chopped
Sausage or other meat, chopped
Horseradish
Mustard
Sour cream – as a topping
Kvas

Oh-oh. The last ingredient is a bit of a problem in the U.S. Kvas is a beverage made from fermented black bread. Although it’s possible to make it at home, no one does that any more. A fair substitute, I think, would be near beer, or nonalcoholic beer.

An alternative is to use the milk product called "kefir."  It's available in most American supermarkets, and it's something like a light yogurt.  It can be used as the broth of this cold soup in place of kvas, thinned out a bit with water.

If you try this in the U.S. and mix near beer or kvas with the chopped vegetables and meat, I think that to get the full Russian experience of summer you should also turn off your air conditioner.

Food Safety Alerts

In an earlier posting, “Secrets of A Russian Housewife,” I stated that the women I know here like to make pelmeni by hand, rather than buy it at a store, like I do. Or rather, like I used to do – until I read the following article in the Moscow Times. The first shocker was learning that at least some commercial pelmeni (Russian ravioli) contains horse meat rather than beef. Then I noted that Darina pelmeni has been recalled in Sverdlovsk (the area surrounding Ekaterinburg). Tons of meat had come from animals infected with anthrax.  

By the way, for the past six months Russian authorities have halted the shipment of chicken from the United States ostensibly because chlorine has been used as a disinfectant. This vigilance in protecting Russian consumers also keeps them from getting frozen chicken that is bigger and cheaper than what is produced in Russia.

I’ll be looking for follow-up stories to the one reprinted below. I’d expect that a few people might get into trouble with these revelations. If that ever happens, I’ll share that news on this blog.


Anthrax Death Linked to Pelmeni 
03 August 2010
The Moscow Times

One man died and five others were hospitalized after contracting anthrax at a farm in the Omsk region that supplied horse meat for pelmeni sold in Moscow and other regions, Interfax reported Monday. 

All six victims fell ill after being hired to cut meat from diseased animals, said Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service. Horses started dying at the farm in June, but the farm's owners hid the deaths, he said. 

Lifenews.ru said about 2 1/2 tons of horse meat with anthrax was supplied to Darina, a prominent pelmeni producer. The meat was confiscated, as were shipments of the company's pelmeni in the Moscow, Omsk, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Tver regions, the Novy Region news agency reported.

The Health Hotel

I'm starting to write this while in the salt room of the  Health Hotel, undergoing speleology treatment.  I'm to be here for 45 minutes -- sitting, breathing, and listening to New Age music.  That's 30 minutes longer than yesterday, and 30 minutes longer than I can sit without a great deal of figetting.  

When Slava and I arrived at the Health Hotel in Kislovodsk, the doctor who checked us in over-ruled the doctor in Ekaterinburg, who said I have feeble limbs (see August 7 posting on "Health Problems").  The treatment for me here would be for "chronic bronchitis in remission."

Breathing ions in a room walled with bricks of salt is one prescribed treatment.  Five minutes daily of inhalation therapy is another, using a face mask to breathe in air moistened with narsan mineral water.  Every other day I bathe in narsan water; on alternating days I have a "circular shower" for blood flow stimulation.  On alternate days I also get a ten-minute spinal massage.  And every day I get a mug of phytochai, a herbal tea concocted for better breathing.

Slava is getting several different treatments.  He gets a strong underwater massage, magnetic treatments for his knees, and a herbal tea appropriate for his Type A personality.

Actually I don't think that I've ever seen Slava as relaxed as he is here.  He knows the routines of a Russian health spa, and like most clients here he readily accepts the prescription of resting between treatments.

All treatments are scheduled for morning hours.  The afternoons are hot, and without air conditioning or electric fans.  Our sluggish bodies frequently end up napping.  We do, however, often take walks in the afternoon or evening.  We've climbed the hill to Red Rocks, walked to the Valley of Roses, gone off trail to pick pears at an abandoned orchard, and (my favorite) walked 15 minutes downtown to use the public access computers at the main post office.

Good health...good access to the Internet... I appreciate both more than ever!

Learning Russian -- Part II

The first hurdle to learning Russian is the Cyrillic alphabet. Five letters are easy, just like ours: A,K,M,O, T. Eleven others are mostly Greek, and then there are four that make a sibilant sound. The tricky letters are Latin in style, but different in pronunciation: B is ”veh,” H is “en,” P is “er,” C is “ess,” E is “yeh,” X is “khah,” and Y is “oooh.”  The Cyrillic letter for I is sometimes written like U, and the letter T can look like a lower case m.  So...

 The storefront sign says “Coffee House.” The sign on the kiosk transliterates to "Pit Stop."

Learning Russian Part I

 Sign for a "Dino-Park"

The good news is that I seem to remember most of the Russian I learned while living here.

The bad news is that it never was very much.

My first week back I was labeling some containers in the kitchen, and I remembered that the word for flour is “myka” (pronounced “moo-KA”). Slava asked me if I knew the meaning of “myka,”pronounced “MOO-ka.” No, I didn’t. It turns out that myka can mean either flour or “anguish.” With just this one example you can imagine badly I can garble the Russian language.

Ah, let me give you another example. The other day I was in the kitchen with our Russian daughter-in-law, and as she was cutting up vegetables I asked her if she wanted an onion. Only, what I offered her was a manhole cover, Slava said.

Russian grammar is complicated. In addition to suffixes and prefixes, some words have infixes – take a word apart, stuff something in the middle, and put the word back together. Nouns have three declensions and six cases. Verbs have two conjunctions and lots of irregular forms. So many opportunities to make mistakes!

To improve my Russian I like watching three things on television: sports, weather reports, and advertising. These three are presented with limited vocabulary. Win-lose, wet-dry, buy now…

My greatest skill is in listening. My good friend Galina knows English well, but prefers to speak in Russian. So when we get together, she speaks Russian and I speak English. We get along just fine.

Fire, Fire!

The most severe heat wave here in recorded history (temperatures up to 40 Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit), combined with an unusual drought, has led to a conflagration that has surrounded Moscow with smoldering peat bogs and out-of-control forest fires. The resulting smog may itself be setting a record.  Slava and I are safely away from the fires in European Russia; right now we're in the northern Caucuses Mountains, but on August 18 we'll be going to Moscow.  We trust that conditions in Moscow will be better then than they are today. 

The country's chief lung doctor, Alexander Chuchalin, has said the air pollution is equal to about two packs of cigarettes smoked within three or four hours. The pollution-monitoring agency said that pollution has reached a level 10 times higher than acceptable, and has urged Moscow residents to wear thick, eight-layer face masks outdoors.

But what about the air indoors? Very few Moscovites have air conditioning. The air inside apartments is the same as air outside. Moscovites have nowhere to go to get away from the smog. That part of the story hasn’t generally been reported.

I won’t get into the various examples of incompetence and lack of planning for dealing with today’s problems. Let me just say that summertime fires in the highly combustible peat bogs are a regular occurrence, albeit not usually so dramatic as this year.  

It is said that a question Russians frequently ask is “Who’s to blame?” The fall guy is not usually a high level person, although this time Putin himself has been criticized. Frequent Kremlin critic Yulia Latynina says, “In reality, there is really only one bureaucrat who is responsible for this tragedy — Putin himself.”

When Putin signed the Forest Code of 2007, written to please paper mill owners and real estate developers, forests were to be “protected” by those using them, entities with rights to cut them down. The number of forest monitors was cut by 75 percent.

Latynina says, "Although Russia has been burning for a month, the army was ordered to join the firefighting battle only several days ago. Why was the army not called up three weeks ago? Because there is no fundamental system of controlling and managing the country. Putin decides everything in Russia, and he was too busy with other things during the first three weeks of the fires — for example, doing photo ops with bikers in Crimea or singing songs with the 10 spies who recently returned from captivity in U.S. detention centers." 

Not everyone blames Putin. An Interfax news story reports, “Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said Russians should seek to stop sinning in order to end a record drought that has stoked the fires.” 

"One shouldn't think that the drought will pass if we just pray to God and then forget and fall into sin," Kirill said during a visit to the town of Lukoyanov. He cited an Old Testament story about a drought sent on the Jews for worshipping a pagan god and said Russians should turn into "a different people" by abandoning their sins.

You’ll note that the patriarch has opinions not unlike those of some American religious leaders who have commented on the cause of hurricanes.

 I’m going to finger someone who has escaped harsh questioning until now, and that is the king of Moscow – excuse me, the mayor of Moscow for the last 18 years, Yury Luzhkov.

The mayor isn’t around right now. He’s on vacation. Where? His aides won’t say. When will he be back? His aides won’t say. The fires are not his problem, they’re outside the city. Oh.

In my opinion,  the city of Moscow could and should have lots of air conditioned shelters set up for the most vulnerable, if only for a few hours of respite during the day. At minimum, more hospitals could and should be air conditioned.

How many deaths will occur because of the current harsh conditions? The answer to that is political, because of course the question really is, how many deaths will be reported as having been caused by these harsh conditions. Count on lowball figures.

The Moscow Times reported on August 5, “The scorching heat and thick smog in Moscow have not reached levels that could be considered critical, the Russian capital's chief pulmonary specialist said on Thursday.” The report noted however that on Wednesday the overnight invasion of acrid smog had shrouded the city's streets and landmarks in a choking haze that was so dense that airplane pilots diverted to other airports.

Pulmonary specialist Andrei Belevsky said, "The peat bogs [around Moscow] are on fire not for the first time. This concentration [of toxic substances] doesn't harm the health of Muscovites." Ah, what has he been smoking? 

Dateline: Kislovodsk

We arrived in Kislovodsk on Sunday, and one of the first things I learned about the hotel where we are staying for 10 days, is that it has no Internet available for guests.  We will have to make occasional trips into town to use computers at the main post office.  Blogging from Kislovodsk will not be easy!

A Hijack Scare

There are times that I tend to be a little melodramatic. This is one of those times.

About a week ago, the flight that Slava and I will be taking on August 18 had a hijacking scare. The flight is to Moscow from Mineralniye Vody in the North Caucasus. On July 29 a passenger on this flight refused to let the other 104 passengers and crew leave the plane, demanding direct talks with Putin about terrorist activity. There was a 2 ½ hour standoff until police disguised as medics boarded the aircraft, ostensibly to help a passenger who was ill. The would-be hijacker was unarmed and made no direct threats, according to first-hand reports. He simply made demands to meet with authorities and mass media representatives. That was enough, apparently, to scare people.

Although hijacking an airplane is punishable here by up to eight years in prison, the man is more likely to face up to five years on charges of “illegally depriving people of freedom.” Hmm… I can think of other people here in Russia who might be vulnerable to such charges…

August is a month to dread for Russian leaders. Remarkably bad events have happened year after year… In 1991 there was the attempted coup of Soviet leadership (I was here then; my write up of that experience is on an old floppy disk somewhere). In 1998 Russian financial institutions imploded with government debt default (I was here for that one, too). In 2000 there was the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine (Americans were indirectly blamed until evidence indicated otherwise). In 2004 there were bombings of two passenger jets, and on “August 32” (the 1st of September), terrorists in North Ossetia took 1,100 children and adults hostage in the town of Beslan; 300 people died. In 2009 an accident at Sayano-Shushenska hydropower station in Siberia killed 75 people. I think that 2010 will go down as the year of the terrible heat wave and drought, when fires consumed acreages of peat bogs, wheat fields, and even whole villages.

It’s 4:00 am local time, and normally I’m not up quite so early. Slava and I have a flight from Ekaterinburg to Mineralniye Vody (“Mineral Waters”) leaving at 6:10 am. I have little idea what life will be like for the next 10 days. I do expect to be able to blog occasionally, although perhaps not quite as often as while in E-burg. In the meantime, pay attention to any breaking news coming from the Caucasus. If possible, I’ll later give you a first-hand report.

Health Problems

I’ve been diagnosed by a Russian doctor as having feeble limbs. There are two explanations for this diagnosis. The first is that when interviewed in Russian, I might have answered “da” to a question when I should have said “nyet.” The second explanation is a little more complicated.

Slava wanted a traditional Russian vacation this year. In Soviet times people didn’t do frivolous things like go off to have fun; they got authorization for health treatment at a sanitarium. The experience, I’ve been told, is quite relaxing.

I was quite willing to go to the Health Hotel for ten days. Slava made reservations and booked our flight, then he asked me what kind of health treatment I wanted. I said that I feel perfectly fine. It was the wrong answer. “What?!! You’d take the place of someone who really needs it?!!” We set off to find something wrong with me.

It turns out it’s best if there’s just a little bit wrong with you. Having tuberculosis or HIV or a sexually transmittable disease is not good. So I got a lung x-ray, an EKG, went to a gynecologist, and left blood and urine samples at the Russian Academy of Sciences polyclinic. Everything was normal. It was up to one last doctor to determine a reason for me to go to the Health Hotel for ten days.  

I helpfully suggested that my cardiovascular system might benefit from attention. (It doesn’t get enough attention from me, in the form of regular exercise.) As an essentially lazy person I was thinking that Russian medicine might have a machine that would do the work for me while I lie around for ten days... I think this is how I got the diagnosis of having feeble limbs.  

Tea for Two

Entertaining someone at home in Russia almost always means inviting them for tea.

Depending on the time of day and other circumstances, “having tea” can be a lavish spread or something simple. I go for simple.

When my friend Irina Medvedeva came to visit, I served good Chinese tea, some sweet cakes, and fruit. Fresh fruit and something sweet are requirements. I should have had some home-made varenniye jam, but I didn’t. And I didn’t bother making any open-faced sandwiches or other substantive fare.  

Years ago, when I first came to Russia, I was mystified by the social practice of having tea. It seemed that it could mean anything. In the evening it would take the place of supper, and there could be many side dishes. Tea in the morning or afternoon could involve home-made pastries or store-bought pizza. Then I learned the one rule about having tea: Never serve a soup.

Russians like to have soup every day if they can. The meal that has soup, usually in the middle of the day, is called dinner.  

I have learned to appreciate good loose tea. It can be steeped more than once, and when it is made strong, it can be served in a small pot and then diluted with hot water at serving time.

I’ve left out one important aspect of a Russian tea, and that is conversation. It's the real reason we get together. Comments that my friends have made about Russia today will be the subject of a later message.

Ekaterinburg, Yekaterinburg

Peter the Great was tsar when E-burg was founded in 1723. The tsarina was Catherine I, but the city wasn’t named after her – it was named in honor of her patron, St. Catherine. So why wasn’t the city called St. Ekaterinburg, similar to St. Petersburg? Don’t know.

There’s more to say about this place name. E-k-a-t-e-r-i-n-b-u-r-g is close to the Russian spelling, which has a few Cyrillic characters thrown in that I can’t produce in this blog. The pronunciation is Ye-ka-TER-in-burg, hence the spelling in English usually begins with a Y, and that’s likely the way you’ll see the city on a map (Yeltsin’s name, by the way, transliterated from Russian, is Eltsin.)

The Governor’s Palace, pictured here, is from tsarist times. Like other buildings of this era, it has a stucco façade and lots of ornamentation. Buildings from pre-revolutionary times are often brightly restored with the pastel colors used in Europe during earlier epochs. But such restoration is expensive, and not all old buildings get this loving treatment.

 
There’s another name for the city that is of historic importance. During the Soviet period the city was called Sverdlovsk, named after the Bolshevik hero Yakov Sverdlovsk. Who was this guy? Well, the usually reliable Wikipedia says that he was a close ally of Vladimir Lenin, and that he played an important role in planning the October Revolution. He is said to be the person who ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, which took place here in the city of Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. Later Sverdlov was the chief architect of the Red Terror. “It was claimed that Lenin provided the theories and Sverdlov made sure they worked.” That is what Wikipedia says. Russians say differently.  

My friend Galina believes that in ordering the execution of the tsar, Sverdlov was merely carrying out Lenin’s diktat. Slava says that within the last week he read a historian’s report saying that local Bolsheviks were entirely responsible for the murder of the tsar, and that no one in Moscow was informed of it for four days. Sverdlov was in any case guilty of many other murders, which were called justified by the still-influential Communist Party. The statue of Sverdlov remains on the main street of Ekaterinburg

 
The statue of Vladimir Lenin has never been brought down in this city, and it remains a prominent part of 1905 Square. There’s no statue that I know of for the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, whose political career began in this city. Yeltsin is remembered with distaste for the tumultuous chaos that occurred with the break up of the Soviet Union. 

The local duma or parliamentary body meets here. It’s not exactly a vibrant example of democracy. Russia has a “power vertical” system, which means that the locals are to follow the diktats of their superiors. In the 1990s local elections resulted in governors and mayors who were not always compliant with the wishes of the Kremlin. Putin appointed presidential representatives to deal with these local bosses, but he’s found it much more efficient to have governors be appointed rather than elected, and within the last few months Ekaterinburg has lost the opportunity to elect the city mayor. The duma exists to ratify whatever it’s supposed to ratify. An efficient system, yes?

During the Soviet era this city was closed to foreigners, hence it was not known in the west. But it’s the fourth largest city in Russia and growing year by year. The third largest city, Novosibirsk, is dropping in population. Both E-burg and Novosibirsk experience more deaths than births (in E-burg there were 54,500 births and 65,000 deaths in 2008). Growth in E-burg comes from in-migration because of job opportunities. Right now E-burg has about 1.3 million people, with 4.5 million in the general area. The population is 90 percent ethnic Russian with splinter representation from 21 different ethnic groups.

 
A large cathedral was recently built on the site of the Ipatiev House, where the family of Tsar Nicholas II was bloodily assassinated on July 17, 1918.

 

The Iset River flows placidly through the city, and a few tall buildings can be seen in the background.

The wrought iron gazebo is an example of the ironwork frequently found around this town, which is the economic center of minerals processing. The region is rich in natural resources, particularly in metals (iron, copper, gold, platinum), minerals (asbestos, gemstones, talcum), marble and coal. Logging and wood-processing are important, too. It all contributes to air and water pollution, but for right now the emphasis is on economic growth.

 
Ekaterinburg is a military headquarters as well as an industrial center. It was here that American U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. Although bits of his aircraft were meticulously collected and sent to Moscow for study, Slava says that local boys boasted for years that they found metallic scraps they were sure had come from the American U-2 spy plane.

A few street scenes...

                   … a summer outdoor café…

 
…a woman crossing the street… Japanese model cars seen in abundance…

 
…a walkway down the main boulevard of town, Lenina Prospekt. Ekaterinburg is more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow. It’s not likely to be on a tourist itinerary any time soon and so it’s going to remain an unknown place for most Americans – except for those who read my blog!

Russian Dachas

 The dacha is a country house, yet it is much more than that. The dacha pictured here belongs to my friend Galina. Although it looks like a nice cottage, it’s not what Russians call a “cottage.” Russians use the word “cottage” (with lots of Cyrillic letters) to describe a brick mansion or a very modern structure that is a display of social status, wealth and power. Only the very rich have cottages.  

The root word of dacha is “given.” During tsarist times aristocrats were given large country dachas by the tsar himself. During the Soviet era small dachas were given to ordinary people by the enterprise they worked for. Communist leaders got bigger dachas, but all the land belonged to the state, and the rights to a particular dacha could be taken away. Today, with private land ownership, dachas can be bought and sold.

Dachas are weekend homes on small plots of land that are usually heavily planted with fruits and vegetables. These garden plots provide a huge amount of basic foodstuffs for the Russian people. They take work, lots of work. For the older generation, a bounteous harvest from the dacha provides a sense of security that no matter how tough life is in general, at least they will have food to eat.

Younger Russians with discretionary income may regard a dacha as a place for weekend relaxation. They also like to escape from the city to the clean air of the countryside.

Every Russian I know has a dacha. Actually, it’s estimated that about 25 percent of city dwellers have dachas, and the rest probably know people who’ll invite them to visit.  

A big holiday in Russia is May Day, the first of May – it’s the start of the planting season. Although there are summer harvests of fruit and some vegetables, potatoes and carrots are harvested in the fall.

It’s common to have apple trees, and bushes for black currants, gooseberries, and raspberries. Strawberries and rhubarb are other popular fruits. Vegetables that are commonly grown include potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, radishes, onion, garlic, dill, parsley.

 
Zucchini grows and grows during 18-hour days. One zucchini can feed a family of four.

 
This photo is of the garden at the dacha next to ours. There is a huge field of potatoes to feed the family through the winter.  

 
Like many families we have a greenhouse. Ours is larger than most and has two rooms. Many of the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and herbs grown here by a gardener may end up in a local market.

 
Here is our dacha. Although most are just one story, this one has bedrooms upstairs. It is made of logs and was built in the 1980s, when private persons weren’t supposed to be able to build such things. How Slava managed to buck the system is a story for his autobiography, which I hope he writes one day.

Careful What You Wish For

Not long ago I expressed a yearning for hot water. We had it for a while last weekend, but we had to leave town to get it.

We spent the weekend at our country dacha, which is a rustic home about 50 kilometers from here. Although we didn’t have the luxury of flush toilets, we did have filtered well water and an instant hot water heater in the kitchen.

Having hot water in the kitchen was great, but how about in the bath? Well, at a Russian dacha there is often a separate “banya.” Ours is shown in the accompanying photo. The banya is something like a Scandinavian sauna. 

Picture a winter scene where hardy people are super-heated in a sauna or a banya, and then run out into the snow. Now picture a sweltering summer day with the temperature hovering over 90 degrees. There’s no place to get cool. Would you like to get even hotter?

It was with misgivings that I agreed to use the banya. The outer room, the one for relaxing, was perhaps 95 degrees from the heat seeping in from the other rooms. We could sit in the first room for a while and listen to music CD’s while having a drink of one kind or another, which we might have done in cooler weather. This time we went straight on into the bathing room. Vats of water were there for us, some hot and some cold. We mixed according to our own preferences and soaped up thoroughly. We were busy enough that we didn’t mind that the heat had crept up to more than 110 Fahrenheit. Once we were clean we stepped into the last room. The heat hit me like a wall. I asked Slava what the temperature was, and he replied that it was over 95. “It feels hotter than that!” I corrected him. “Shirl, that’s 95 degrees Celsius,” he said. And in his usual quick way he calculated Tf = 9/5Tc +32 and told me that the temperature was 203 degrees Fahrenheit.  

Let me tell you what happened next. My own internal circuitry for temperature sensitivity got fried. When we stepped out of the banya, the 90 degree air felt positively cool. And for the next 24 hours my body sensors continued to compare ambient temperature to the banya experience.

So, when you’re feeling hot and sweaty, try getting hotter and sweatier. It feels so good when you return to just hot and sweaty!

Where Asia Meets Europe

In my last post I gave you some latitude, starting with 54-40. Today I’ll go into what’s interesting about the longtitude here.

As shown in the photo of 7-year-old Sofia Timasheva, there is a line nearby showing where Asia meets Europe. It’s possible to stand with one foot in Asia, and another in Europe (Note the names written in Russian Cyrillic. They’re pronounced “A-zi-ya” and “Yev-ro-pa.”)

So, where’s the line? It goes down the Ural Mountains, which stretch from the Arctic Ocean to the steppes of Kazakhstan. Geologists say that the Ural Mountains formed when two tectonic plates crashed into each other. Wow! The event happened 250 – 300 million years ago, and I guess it took place over a few million years…I’ll have to give up the image I had of one loud crash when the continents collided…

The city of Ekaterinburg is located in the middle of the Ural Mountains. You may imagine it to be like Denver, Colorado, but please remember that the Rockies are young, less than 76 million years old. As a matter of fact, the Urals are the oldest mountain range in existence, and they’re quite worn down. In the middle, latitude-wise, there’s a wide saddle of low land, and that’s where E-burg is located. The altitude “here in the middle of the Urals,” is a mere 780 feet.

Ekaterinburg is on the Asiatic side of the Urals, on the edge of Siberia. On another day I’ll provide some pictures and describe the city. 

54 40 or Fight

Before I get into the topic of the day, I’m going to make a digression. In high school I had a teacherless course in American history, and I loved it. I took American history in a summer school correspondence course in order to make room in my junior year schedule for something-or-other.  If I had had the usual history course it would have been taught, most likely, by an athletic coach who was put in social studies classes during the day. I saved myself from a dull experience and found out that history is what we choose to make of it.

I was surprised that summer to learn of the passions that have inflamed political leaders throughout American history. The Good Guys, it seems, are dedicated, persistent, eloquent, and altruistic. The Bad Guys are monomaniacs, obsessive, raucous, and self-centered. Ah, but the separation of Good Guys and Bad Guys is in the eyes of the beholder.  

     “Hang together or hang separately”…”Remember the Maine”…   ”54 40 or Fight…”

It’s that last slogan that came to mind to me recently. As the political slogan of presidential candidate and eventual winner James Polk in 1844, it threatened a third war with Great Britain. The Good Guys (or were they the Bad Guys?) said that the proper boundary of the United States in the Oregon Territory was at the edge of Russia-America, at the 54-40 parallel. Great Britain had a puny hold on the land north of the 49th parallel, which was the border for the rest of Canadian Territory. As this dispute continued, President Polk led us into war with Mexico. It really wasn’t a propitious time for another war with Great Britain, and so negotiation settled the U.S. – Canadian border at the 49th parallel. The disputed land became British Columbia and part of Canada.

You may know that the major population centers of British Columbia and other Canadian provinces are generally near their southern borders. There’s not much up at 54-40. I say that to put in perspective the fact that the Russian metropolis of Ekaterinburg is even farther north, at 56 52.  Moscow is just a smidge to the south, at 55 45 (and more than 1,000 miles to the east).

The weather in Ekaterinburg is continental, which means that like the Plains states in the U.S., it has temperature extremes. It’s cold in the winter, and it can be hot in the summer. Russians know how to deal with cold weather. Hot weather can be a problem. Since uncomfortable summer weather lasts only a few weeks, it is just something to be tolerated. I’m relearning how to live without air conditioning.

Being far north in the summer means that days are long and nights are short. It might still be light when we go to sleep. The sun is definitely up before we are.

Location, location, location. It does matter.