Field Trip

Chou and I visited Brighton Beach today (via the Coney Island boardwalk) to hang out with the Russians. It's been ten years since I've really used my Russian, so I could only understand about a quarter of the written Russian I encountered and I could only understand very small snatches of the spoken Russian, but I still pulled out my rusty skills so I could tell Chou helpful things like, "That is a pharmacy. These are yucky cookies. Those are filled with cabbage." Occasionally I would see a word and suddenly realize that I knew it and in my head I would yell, "Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!" I felt like Marmot Babe. Right before I left Utah, Marmot Babe was very busy acquiring language and repeated everything we said to him. One day my sister handed him his lunch and told him what it was and then Marmot Babe crowed, "Hot dog! Hot dog! Hot dog!" until someone gave him a new word to yell. I even (badly) ordered our lunch for us in Russian (with a little bit of English and a lot of pointing). We shared a potato piroshki and a meat-filled something or other (that's where most of the pointing came in) and poppy seed-filled bread (that's where some English came in - with poppy seeds=s myakom, yes? maybe not). It was lovely. And I didn't even give in to the temptation to buy priyaniki.