Riga - day 1

Friday I hurried the kids to sadik and rushed back to the house because the taxi was arriving at 9:30am.  We got to the airport and checked in. Boarding, arriving, getting cash from the ATM, taxi ride with a driver listening to Russian radio got us to the hotel - all smooth as silk. We grabbed a drink and snack at the hotel and waited excitedly for our other friend, who we expected any minute.

This is how the ladies' weekend began. Travel with one small carry-on bag, reading the magazine on the plane, moving easily from one thing to the next.  Terry had his turn last month when he visited a friend in Sweden, and this weekend one friend from Petersburg and I met another friend from Lithuania in the mid-point of Latvia.


By the time our friend arrived at the hotel to meet us, it was Happy Hour at the hotel bar. Her travel SNAFUs dictated that we take advantage of the buy 1 get 1 free cocktails (well, in Latvian and English it said BOGO. In Russian, interestingly enough, it said buy 2 cocktails get the 3rd one free. Hm)



The in-flight magazine highly recommended a restaurant in the old city not too far away so we went. First, the building was adorable (seen below). Appetizers were phenomenal. I had a cream of chestnut soup with duck, I forget if it was roasted or smoked but anyway it was delicious. One friend got an elk goulash and the other had beef carpaccio. Then the mains came. I am so glad my soup completely filled me up, as my pheasant was so dry and overcooked I  could barely swallow a bite, and actually had to take a sip of water to help it go down. One friend's catfish was undercooked although the asparagus that was the real reason she ordered the dish was perfect. The third friend, just like Goldilocks' littlest bear, had a perfectly juicy lamb.

 After dinner we stopped at the wine bar a few doors down from our hotel and ordered a bottle to share. The proprietor was extremely cordial, especially as we were the last people to leave the restaurant and had only bought a bottle of wine.

On the way back to the hotel we saw this interesting Riga phenomenon of bicycle rickshaws. As I never saw anyone riding in one, I wonder what kind of business they get. The rickshaws each have a blanket to keep you cozy in the snow and they all pipe out pretty loud music.
NOTE: TERRY DOES NOT APPROVE OF THIS PHOTO.

 

And now she reads

Today I went to the book store and found some "my first reader" type books in Russian. I know Alex is ready, I hadn't realized how ready.

Tonight she read the entire book of Masha and Medved. 25 sentences. She didn't know the meaning of every word but then neither did I. After dinner I read the book to her and we talked about what was going on.

We are opening a whole new chapter! I am so happy Bukvoed is having a big sale on children's books this month!

The countdown really begins

Plane tickets, purchased. Hotel for rest stop, booked. Dates for packout, still tentative but in process. Pre-packout survey date set, if that counts.

On our list of "must do" before we go ... only 2 things we'd be heartbroken if we didn't do:
1. One more day at Elagin
2. One more shashlik night in Tavrichesky Sad.
  2.a) and if I could get to one more Mikhailovsky ballet before we go, it would be great. However I do recognize I have been completely ballet spoiled, probably gone more time in the last 4 years than in at least the 20 years preceding it if not my whole life.

The main points on that list are entirely dependent on Mother Nature, who doesn't seem to be a big fan of Piter this year. We'll see how much we get accomplished.

Wordless Wednesday

Russians and their language

It is well known to people who have ever tried to speak Russian to a Russian that they are very particular about how their language is spoken. "Muttonburger" gets wide-eyed stares, "Moo-ton beurh-gher" get the waitress scribbling in her pad. So far as a I know every detsky sad has a speech pathologist who comes by to check that the kids are able to speak properly.

So it should come as no surprise that all over town for the last few months have been these billboards proclaiming:
"Let's Speak Like Petersburgians"

At first I had no idea what it was all about. T explained that it's meant for people who are not from Moscow/Piter but other Russian speaking countries or other parts of Russia who may not
speak "properly".


One billboard I saw a few months ago went through numbers. This one seems to have negotiation and worker type words (agreement, facilitate, draw/scoop, quarter/block ...  but then "utterly"?)

Go Gevalia!

And on a lighter note ... I have to give a shout out to our coffeemaker.  If, hypothetically, someone were to turn on the coffeemaker without having ever put any water in, the thing simply shuts itself off. Almost immediately. Yay for no burnt pots or electrical fires!

Wordless Wednesday

This vs. That

Last week Terry had training in Portugal. He did this:

Some beautiful building on the water

 Some beautiful monument on the water

A seagull eating a rat. Notice the water flows, as in it isn't ice

Ah, wine

Meanwhile, I was home with 2 kids who had just gotten over Daddy's last trip. Alex had all the medical issues going on. We did this:

Yep I let Zoltan have the camera. Heck, Terry doesn't like it (camera) anyway.

  Treat!

 They gave him that lollypop free. Alex's was red.

That sign says "Happy Phone" above the seafoam green telephone

 Playground at the detsky sad when we went to pick Alex up after our special day together

 Of course, Alex and I had to hit the same cafe on our special day.

 The tea here is amazing. And comes with a little cookie.

 Super heroes duking it out

A different view on medical care overseas

Back in October, Alex started coughing. I don't know much about the first week or so, it happened while I was in Tver and the family caught a cold - which was to turn into more than a cold for each of them.

She hasn't stopped coughing. At first the teachers and other parents thought she was still sick and I was accosted and accused for bringing her to school. This continued even after a month - c'mon guys, anyone with an iota of reason knows than more than a month later you don't still have a cold. And she clearly didn't have tuberculosis.

We went through all the obvious things, bronchitis, allergies etc and the coughing never let up. We saw an ENT who diagnosed post-nasal drip. I cut dairy out of her diet in case it was causing the PND. And yet ... she woke up every morning coughing, and spent some time coughing every night before falling asleep. Sometimes she woke in the night coughing. Naptime at school was the same.

A couple of months into all this mess, she told me she had a tummy ache. She pointed pretty high up her chest. We gave her 1/2 a Tums. A few weeks later, it happened again. Then, constant tummy aches, and daily heartburn. I get on the trusty old internet and ... GERD. All the symptoms, none of the causes. The Consulate doctor is away. A friend hands me her bottle of Zantac 150, we look up dosage for children and haphazardly chop up a pill for Alex.

A week later Alex still coughs but not as much. She says her tummy hurts less, but it still hurts every day. I put her bed up on some thick books but I'm not sure it's high enough. We got to see the Consulate doctor, who wants her to finish dinner 3h before bedtime. Yeah, Russian kids go to bed way later than American ones - she's still at detsky sad 3h before bedtime. Doc agrees GERD but is concerned as to why Alex has it - she's not a baby, not an adult, not overweight, doesn't eat any offending foods, etc etc.

She first recommended an endoscopy. Here they are usually done without anesthesia as "without" it's 15 minutes, "with" you have to plan 24 hours in the hospital. So we got to stress out for a few days about whether that is something we want to do at post or if we can/want to medevac. Sounds ridiculous for a 15 minute procedure but the quality of medical care received at post, especially diagnostically, has been bad enough several people have had to medevac after tests in order to get better tests. I am not making Alex go through an endoscopy twice.

THEN we hear back, after the local doctor confers with the American doctor in Moscow, that she first recommends doing a test for h.pylori bacteria as it is the likely cause of this. Does this test exist in Russia? We don't know yet and thus need to continue to worry about Alex's GI health.

Just one more thing that would be so much easier if we lived in the USA. At least we can get broken arms set properly here - something not true at every post!
[note, this post was written in draft form, the last sentence included, before Alex fell and broke her arm again. Quel coincidence!]

Some good things about being posted overseas

As already mentioned, Alex broke her arm yesterday. She fell off the bed, started screaming and crying in that way that means "I didn't just bruise something" although I did get the ice immediately in hopes we were all wrong.

In the USA ... I don't actually have any idea what I would do in the USA. Show up at an emergency room? Call her pediatrician?

In Russia, I immediately called our local doctor, the one who comes to the Consulate every week and is American board certified. Best of both worlds. She called the private clinic closest to us, found out when we could come in for a consult with the pediatric doctor on call (this is a weekend of course) and get an x-ray if he concurs it's necessary. I kept Alex in ice and TV until it was time to go - a little less than an hour.

When we got to the clinic and checked in, we were told to go right up to the pediatric floor. The doctor met us as we were coming out of the elevator. After he checked Alex out, we did have to wait about 10 minutes before heading down to X-ray. When we got there, we waited about another 10 minutes before we got in for the X-ray. They ushered me out of the room (last time they let me stay, just gave me my own lead apron thing) and I saw the x-rays as they came up on the screen. I knew about as soon as the docs knew that yep, she broke her arm across both bones.

From there we went directly to the room where the doctor, who had been with us throughout, met up with an assistant and put on the cast. He told me when to come back next week, and that was it. I paid $350 that I hope insurance will reimburse me for and got home about 2 hours after I left the house.

From friends' stories back home, I imagine the snacks and activities I had throw into my bag before leaving would have been much more heavily utilized had this occurred in the USA.For this trip, the Leapster was more than enough.