Alcampo

I dragged my husband into the Spanish affiliate of the store known as Ashan in Russia.  In Spain, the chain is called Alcampo, although, except for the logo, you could easily mistake it for a completely different company. Let me start by saying that it would had never occured to me to take pictures in Alcampo, but Moscow has had this effect on me.

Alcampo, a normal spanish grocery store.

First of all, we were there on a Sunday at noon. There was not a soul! After a few months in Moscow, getting to a supermarket with no people gives you a weird feeling… maybe everybody died?

Not a single human being!

Few people here and there… no, really I mean it’s completely empty!

Now let’s contrast this with an “Ashan” in Moscow:

Back in Spain, what’s wrong with these potatoes? Why there aren’t hundreds of people around them?!

Normal potatoes!

Are these clean carrots poisonous? Where are the old ladies digging and fighting for them…? They are not rotten and dirty. They look so suspiciously delicious!

The flavour changes a lot when you don’t eat them with sand!

Potatoes and carrots are presented a little differently in Moscow:

In Spain, an endless variety of real, delicious, tasty cheeses? It makes it too confusing!

All these different types of cheese!

And more?

… and yet even more! Can someone pinch me? is this for real?

In Moscow, the selection of cheeses at Ashan makes choosing much less complicated:

In Spain, all sorts of cured meats. Why would you want so many options?

Why do other countries chose to live without these? why do they torture themselves?

I always took these things for granted. If US was bad, Russia is even worse.

Fruits in Spain… they are not rotting, smashed or partially chewed.

It seems so easy, right?

Tangerines, oranges, many varieties of apples,… It just doesn’t happen in Moscow!

Coconuts are at least double, if not triple, the size of kiwis… so strange!

Mmmm, suspicious…

I can’t say the same about the coconuts in Moscow (which are the kiwis?):

Then, these… endless supply of delicious pastries. Pure torture!

I have always wondered why the first colonizers decided to settle in such harsh and cold lands when you could live in a warmy climate.  In my opinion it’s worth fighting for those lands… And now looking at the food supply you can provide for your people, it makes even less sense. Why isn’t everybody trying to invade Spain anymore?

The first time I left Ashan I felt like crying. Strangely, today walking around Alcampo and seeing all these goodies I felt like crying too.

Monasteries around Moscow

We also joined another tour to see some of the most important monasteries around Moscow. They told us there used to be 20, but many of them were destroyed during Soviet times. So it’s likely that if we see empty squares near the city center, it’s a place where there used to be a church or even monastery. It seems like also they are rebuilding a lot of them, especially the ones inside the Kremlin. And again… their concept of monastery differs quite a lot from mine… I would call them churches or cathedrals.  Some of them look like monasteries but not all… something got lost in translation, maybe?

So with the help of my husband (no way I could remember all those names…) here are some of the monasteries we visited!

This the Christ the Savior Cathedral, I approve of it as Cathedral.  It was destroyed by the Soviets in the 1930s and only recently rebuilt.

Danilov Monastery. The Soviets turned this into an orphanage, or, as our guide referred to it, “a little criminal factory.” It looked a little depressing while we walked around. I could totally see a bunch of orphans living there…

Donskoi Monastery… a whole monastery, really?

Donskoi Monastery Cemetery, where many Russian aristocrats are buried.

Novodevichy Cemetery, where much of Russia’s cultural and political elite are buried.

If you are wondering how the dirt makes it all the way to the top, I am wondering the same thing…

A ballerina at the Novodevichy Cemetery

Novodevichy Convent. Peter The Great forced both his step sister and first wife to become nuns and live here.

Sergiev Posad…

Assumption Cathedral

… or the coldest day of my life! We signed up to go on an organized tour to this Monastery Complex about an hour and a half from Moscow.  We don’t have our car ready yet and it seemed easy enough for my 31 weeks of pregnancy (believe it or not, I am getting heavy… it’s hard to move all this extra weight around!).

What I did not know when I signed up for this voluntarily was that it was going to be a little chilly out there… The temperature was going to drop to the coldest temperature my body has ever yet experienced AND I was going to spend much of the day outside. Obviously, under any other circumstances I would have never ventured outside in these types of conditions.

The temperature ALL day was at least -20 C (-4 F), and with the wind chill it felt like -32 C (-25.6 F, yes, close to where celsius meets farenheit!). For this type of “adventure” I would normally have worn at least eight to ten layers of clothing plus my best winter coat…  unfortunately, given the size of my belly I can barely zip up my winter coat, so I could only wear two thin layers and none of them included long johns (I don’t fit in those either). Fun.

Our first bus stop was at a sightseeing view point of the monastery… pretty, sure! But not THAT pretty… After a couple of pictures I was sure I was losing my fingers. No, don’t take this lightly, you have most likely never experience a temperature like this and if you have you were not pregnantly-undressed for the event! It hurts.

This was our first stop. My husband almost lost all his fingers trying to get this picture…

The tour guide gave this really long speech about the place but I am going to spare you all the details and tell you what I think was the take home message… Apparently this monastery started as a young kid named Sergei, or Sergius, (from a richy rich family) decided to become a monk in the empty forest. Some people around the area realized he was there and went to visit to ask him things.  They found that they really like his answers, so a bunch of people moved to the forest.  Then some monks move there, too, and they ended up asking him to be the leader, to which he said no at first and then he said yes and set up a bunch of strict rules for monks. End of the story. Here I have some pictures of the Monastery.

It was misserably cold and extremely slippery… 

This is St. Sergius, in case you were wondering… 

A monk! 

Mosaic inside Assumption Cathedral 

Our guide referred to these as Cathedrals…. in Spain, these are churches, Cathedrals are… bigger, more impressive… but we also have a more gentle climate, so I don’t blame the construction workers for wanting to cut it short and make a smaller version to be done with it.

Ok, fine this cathedral is not too bad.. just this one!

We also visited some man-made caves built by some monks that decided it was too cold outside and the wooden houses of the time weren’t cutting it. Then they marketed it as a way to live a simple life with the bare minimum, but I don’t buy it.

Chernigovsky skete 

This picture was taken inside one of the more elegant cells in the caves under the church.

During our last stop at the birthplace of Sergei, an ice crystal formed in my eye, making me afraid I would lose my eyeball…

St. Sergius Statue in Radonezh

Every time I was outside, listening to our guide or taking pictures, there was a song from Mecano (Spanish band) playing in my head, “Heroes de la Antartida” (Heroes of the Antarctic”)…”tiene heladas tambien las manos, pero nadie le quiere abandonar…” (his hands are also frozen, but none wants to leave him behind…). It’s a really nice song about Captain Scott and his team that lead the expedition Terra Nova to reach the South Pole just to find the were beat by the norwegian expedition led by Amundsen. On the way back they all died from exhaustion, hunger and extreme cold temperatures.

At the end of our trip, our guide finally made sense of this whole story by telling us that Sergei had issues learning anything at school until he met a wandering monk that fixed “his unfixable issue”. So this is when we finally learned that Sergei may have had a learning disability, which makes sense because who in their right mind wants to go to live alone in the forest when it’s -32 C (even with global warming)?!?

Last day of winter in Russia

Only for me. Today it’s my last day of winter in Moscow. I have survived. And I am still mentally healthy … haven’t lost my mind to the darkness and cold. But I knew it will be a short winter here for me… so I can’t get all the credit. We’ll see next year. For now, I am going to enjoy the end of the balmy winter in Spain and I will be back sometime in April. I am sure I will still get a chance to enjoy some more snow when I get back, I think it’s almost guaranteed.

Side note: The last couple of weeks we have joined a couple of tours that I haven’t had the time to post about, but I will soon!

Blue sky

After a nice break in Spain, we are back in Moscow. Today, for the first time since we got here I have seen a splendid blue sky!!  As blue and nice as it was every single day I was in Spain, here it only happens once every 2 months…

But a blue sky comes with a high price… a very high price…. to the point that I don’t ever want to see a blue sky anymore…

A temperature of -16 Celsius (3 Fahrenheit) that feels more like -25C (-13F)… So, yeah, it was cold today. I felt my alveoli freezing, my eyes drying and snowflakes building up in my nose blocking my airway… Winter has come!

The shortest day of the year

The shortest day of the year is coming up! It’s a good thing because it only gets better after that. Sadly, I won’t be in Moscow for the most misserably short day of the year. I will be in Spain, where the shortest day is not that short…

So on December 22nd:

– Moscow –> Sunrise: 8:57am / Sunset: 3:58pm. Total of 7 hours and 1 min of “light”.

I put “light” in quotes, because most days in cloudy Moscow I wouldn’t say there is an abundance of light… So this is by far the worst place I have ever lived in terms of hours of sunlight during winter. Compared to:

– Madrid –> Sunrise: 8:34am / Sunset: 5:51pm. Total of 9 hours and 17min of light.

– Baltimore –> Sunrise: 7:23am / Sunset: 4:47pm. Total of 9 hours and 24min of light.

– Dayton –> Sunrise: 7:54am / Sunset: 5:16pm. Total of 9 hours and 22min of light.

To be honest I am surprised that Madrid doesn’t have the longest day of all.  But it makes sense because it’s about the same latitude as the US East Coast. So it’s probably the weather that makes it feels that the days are even longer than they are!

But, it could be worse, we could be even further north than here…

– St. Petersburg –> Sunrise: 9:33am / Sunset: 4:18pm. Total of 6 hours and 45min of light.

I decided not to look any further and just feel sorry for the inhabitants of these places… It could also be so much better, we could be in the Southern hemisphere where the summer is about to start and days are looooong!

– Sydney –> Sunrise: 5:40am / Sunset: 8:05pm. Total of 14 hours and 25min of light!!!

It’s Christmas!

Yes, Christmas comes early to Moscow, too! And you can’t pretend otherwise. GUM (literally “main department store”) was built during tsarist-times.  In the Soviet Union, GUM was the main gallery for all the products socialism built.  In the post-Soviet era, it morphed into the city’s premiere shopping destination.  It’s now full of very fancy, pricey stores! This is how it looks when it’s not Christmas.

The gum

But now, it looks more like this! It’s pretty easy to get lost among all the decorations and designer wear and never find your way back out…

Shopping center

The view of the building from Red Square is beautiful:

Christmas tree!

It’s cold and dark, but they make it so pretty!

I really like this building for some reason. The lights in contrast with the sky make it look cool…

There is also a cute Christmas Market with a bunch of gift shops.

Cute little market!

We even have a Christmas tree at the entrance of our apartment. Needless to say, a tree like this wouldn’t have lasted long outside our building in Baltimore…  Hell, we couldn’t even stop our recycling bins from getting stolen there.

MEEEERRY CHRISTMAS FROM MOSCOW!!

Danilovsky Rynok (Market) is sweet!

When we thought everything was lost and we would have to survive on Iranian cucumbers (the size of tiny pickles) and Serbian pears, we found this amazing market! Not only do they wash their carrots (for a little extra money) but they also stock delicious Belarusian/Spanish tangerines! And it’s super close to our apartment!

This very nice arrangement of colorful fruits comes with a lot of handling… so we make sure we wash throughly… not the tangerines…

Any possible fruit you could ever imagine… well, almost…

Normally I am not bothered by the look of the animals I eat at the grocery shop. But I find it completely unnecessary to leave some of the skin on the paws of the poor bunnies… yeah, ok, it’s not a cat or big rat. I get it.

A lot of spices and dried nuts! It reminds me of Turkey!

They even have a couple of small restaurants and a pastry/coffee shop area that smells wonderful! The only downside of this place is that it requires a level of Russian speaking skills I don’t have at the moment… Pointing at things helps, but it’s nothing like a Russian speaking husband, which does wonders!

First snow in Moscow!

Not too bad; yesterday was December 10th. I can take snow during December, January, and February. Anytime before or after that is too depressing.

This picture was taken this morning at 11am…

This one was taken yesterday at 3:30pm. It’s as sunny as it gets here!

Also with the snow comes a little bit of nasty slushy snow/mud/corrosive … mix! I hope I don’t ever fall in this…

It makes cars really … gross…

Your shoes don’t look much prettier, especially if you have my husband’s ability to splash gunk on the toe of your shoes…

The thought of sliding in this terrifies me.

I am glad our car hasn’t made it to post yet… I am hoping “he” doesn’t have to live through this nightmare.

Grocery shopping. It gets crowded…

Obviously, one of the first things we needed to do when we got here was to buy food. People kindly offered to take us to two different stores during our first couple of weeks here. We went to a store call Ashan, first. I didn’t realize until I got there that it was Alcampo, the grocery/housewares chain in Spain!! Only when I saw the bird logo did I put it together… turns out it’s actually a French chain. It made me happy to recognize the store. Until we got in there… I ended up leaving somewhat disappointed.

Ashan or also known by me as Alcampo…

The second weekend we went to a store called Metro. I have to say it was waaaay better!  The first trip to Ashan to buy groceries was schedule at 9am to beat the rush (more on that in a minute)… a little too early for me but you know, whatever. The trip to Metro was at 7,30 am… WTF! I thought, we suck… other families seem to be a lot more productive AND active than we are. Probably the baby will shake things up. The truth is that both times, the stores were way too busy for how early it was…

After these two trips we decided to go back to Ashan. Not because it was our favorite but because it was closer and doable without a car.  But we went there on our schedule… Saturday afternoon. It was… a little busy… just take a look…

Going through with your cart it’s almost like Mission Impossible!

Onions and carrots are brought to the store with the entire plot so you can dig through the ground to find the ones you like!

To me it doesn’t look like something I want to buy…

If you don’t pay attention it looks like just trash… but there are some onions in there if you look carefully!

A woman digging for carrots!

Veggies, you mostly buy in the frozen section…

Next to the delicious dried fish… to me it’s just a waste of delicious fish!

It just breaks my little Spanish heart…

The “Cheese selection”, to call it something… it’s neither a selection, because despite having different names it all looks and smells the same, nor cheese… It’s more a like a yellow synthetic salty chewy plastic… And thought American cheese was horrible…

I don’t have words for this…

Let’s not forget about the coconuts about the size of kiwis!

Coconuts the size of kiwis!

And lastly, but not less important, after this battle for a few goodies, this…

Happy shopping!!!