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.