Thursday, May 4, 2017
Hi Again,
Yesterday was more relaxed than the previous days. After lunch here at the flat, Pasha and I took the metro further into the city to meet his dad, Gregory, with his car. We drove to the computer market in town so that Pasha could get a new power adapter for his laptop, since it broke. After that we drove around until we ended up at the Chruch of Christ the Savior. The plan was to check out the church and then to take a short boat trip along the Moscow river, but I'm guessing that the schedules did not align, so instead we did just the boat ride, which was nice.
After that, the sun was beginning to set, and we drove to a theater across the river from "Moscow City," which is the skyscraping financial district of Moscow. None of the buildings there are much more than ten years old. Since all business was controlled by the state until the fall of the Soviet Union, a skyscraper would have been built only if a bureau decided to build one, which I'm guessing would have been an excessive expenditure. I always had assumed that any sufficiently large hub of industry and urbanity would have a district of tall buildings, but not in the Soviet Union.
A relative of Gregory's (and Pasha's) works as chief engineer at the theater. We met him at the theater to mooch off of the employees' cafeteria for dinner as it was closing – chicken soup and "Navy macaroni," and tea, of course. Russians love their tea. And you always eat the soup first.
After dinner we walked across the darkened stage to the front of the building where we met some more relatives. As much as I could ascertain, the engineer is Gregory's second cousin. We met his wife, his mother, some younger cousin about my age, and Ella (Pasha's mom). We walked together to a large coffee shop and talked for a couple of hours. Of course I had no idea what anybody was saying. At one point Gregory asked me to tell everyone, in English, what we had done, but I drew a blank (I also didn't quite understand the context of the question, and suspected my audience did not understand English). Anyway, everyone politely ignored me as I stumbled into nonsense, and then it was back to Russian.
Today we'll probably go to a park where there are a lot of tanks. Gotta love tanks. Cheerio!