Kazan — summer 2012

Had a great night's sleep upstairs. The window was open, but not a single mosquito. Amazing.

I essentially got a full eight hours rest, so I went downstairs to the kitchen with my Nook to do a bit of reading. (I'm incapable of reading in bed.) Flyura was already at work in the kitchen. “Don, why are you up so early?” We chatted a bit, but of course she felt she had to prepare me tea and something to eat. In the meantime she was making homemade noodles for the soup later in the day, a process I had never observed before, and she was also making bliny, the Russian equivalent of crepes.

Once Danila awoke, Flyura sent him to the garden to gather strawberries. When she came back she sliced off a couple pieces of ice cream for each of us (she sliced the blue cylinder of ice cream with a knife!) and poured the berries on top. Ice cream for breakfast? Who's gonna say no to that?

Most of the time when I've had bliny, they have been about the size of a small corn tortilla for small tacos. Flura made hers as big as a standard dinner plate and then cut them into fourths. We ate them by rolling each quarter up by hand and then dipping them in varenye.

There are other ways to eat bliny, i.e. like a standard crepe wrapped around filling, but this was pretty great for breakfast.

Now I have to tell you about the garden here. Russians love their gardens. In the summertime, if a family has a dacha, they head out of town and plant as much as they possibly to prepare for winter. Danila's family actually has a private home just outside of Kazan, and they have enough land to do some serious gardening. And what do they grow? First off, they grow flowers. Russians love flowers! I keep saying ‘Russians,’ but most of what I'm saying here applies to the Tatars I know as well.

Danila's mom goes by Flyura, which I take to be the Russified form of fleur, which is French for ‘flower.’ Here are Flyura's flowers.

But really this is primarily a food garden. She grows strawberries, blueberries and currants, and then makes varenye out of them, a kind of syrupy jam (very tasty). Here is what a currant bush looks like.

What is a garden without sweet Russian cucumbers? Straight from the garden they are crunchy as an apple and have no bitter taste.

Here are the carrots.

And let's not forget the green house for starting delicate tomatos early.

She also grows a couple types of squash.

And now a few general shots.

And then I found the most curious plant that just grows wild around here. She says that the plant produces three-millimeter seeds that are very tasty.

She told me the leaves have a nice smell. I detected nothing. Perhaps if we dried them, rolled them as a cigarette and smoked them, then they would have a fairly distinct odor?

Had a picnic in the afternoon. Details later.

Danila's family have a really large house. I'll add the description later.

These types of brief notes probably seem weird, but if I don't make them now, I'll forget to add the content later.

Had a meeting today with two vice-rectors of the Institute. Looks like things are going well with our second group's invitations. Toured their classrooms and facilities. Amazingly nice. The student cafe in their new multipurpose building was done up like a Singapore cityscape. I've never seen anything so slickly done in Russia.