[Previous entry: "Brrrr"] [Next entry: "Goodbye "coupledom"!"]

01/02/2005: "Happy New Year!"

It is already January 3! It's hard to believe that 2005 is already here. On Friday (New Year's Eve here) we managed to make it through the entire current star wars pentalogy. We started around 9am and finished the last one at around 11pm. (With breaks for lunch and dinner in there, of course). By the time we finished, we were all much too tired to stay up and ring in the Khabarovsk New Year. I went to bed and dozed off, but you could certainly tell when it was midnight! People were lighting fireworks all around us! The noise was crazy. For probably a full hour after midnight all you heard was fireworks. Most of them were just set off by individuals. Much like the ones we can buy at home, except they probably have a lot of them that would be considered illegal at home. They were shooting off mortors and things that lit up in the sky. The noise was crazy. I was too tired to get up and look out the window, but I saw many of them even without getting up. At any rate, New Year's is a bigger holiday here than their Christmas (which makes sense, considering they were banned from practicing religion for so long).

On Saturday (January 1st here) Leigh and Joe invited us all to their room to ring in the East coast New Year at 3:00 (midnight in Michigan) with a glass of champaign and they made dinner for all of us. It was some sort of stir fry type dish with rice and veggies, peanut butter and oil. It was very good! For dessert Adam had picked out a birthday cake for me at the market. We even had a candle! It was quite comical. I can tell you I never expected to celebrate my 26th birthday in Russia! The cake was different that what we have at home, but was very good. We think it had kiwi fruit in it! It was hard to tell, but it was definatley a fruit. After dessert, Brian and Alicia headed back to their apartment (they were feeling kind of icky) and we played some Euchre with the Blaylocks. Over all it was a fun day.

Yesterday we slept until after 8:00. I think our bodies have finally adjusted to the time change. We're able to stay up till around 11 without being dead tired and I can finally sleep past 6:30! It's easy to sleep late here, though, since sunrise is often not until around 9:00! It also gets dark early, so there is not much daylight in the winter. At any rate, we got up showered, then went down to Joe & Leigh's to borrow their cooking facilities. We ate something that I think are called Blini... They're like little thin pancakes stuffed with cottage cheese and, in this case, strawberry flavoring of some sort. They come frozen at the grocery store and you just thaw them and fry them up. It was delicious! Afterward we "watched" a live play-by-play of the Rose Bowl on the internet. It was basically just someone typing in all the plays, so even though we couldn't see the picture, we had an idea of what was going on in the game.

In the afternoon, Adam and I came upstairs to do laundry! I did the washing in the bath tub and the rinsing, he did the wringing out of the water. We had to stop after 2 "loads" because we ran out of places to hang our wet clothes! We will have to try to finish today. Hopefully we won't have to do much more major laundry after this. I forgot to take a picture of it all, but I will try to this time around.

In the evening, we again borrowed the Blaylock Kitchen to make some pelmini (pasta, stuffed with something. In this case it was meat, but it also comes in cabbage, potato, and other varieties--very good) for dinner.
After that, we went to Brian and Alicia's to watch a movie. We watched So I Married and Axe Murderer and American Wedding. Funny flicks.

After that it was back "home" and to bed with us.

I am not sure what we are doing today...

Only 2 more days till we bring Lidia here!!

I will add a few more pictures under the "part 2" section...