25 | January | 2015 | small house/BIG GARDEN

This week’s photo challenge is part 2 of my Moscow penpal saga. If you’re new or missed part 1, read this first. The short version: I’ve been communicating with a Russian man for quite awhile now, and this week I received a package!

Ayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! 🙂 Such crazy fun and what an interesting glimpse of a major cultural difference! First the trinkets:

…next, a perfectly themed Yuri Gagarin t-shirt! Evgeny is an astrophysicist: one of our earliest conversations was about the Cold War Space Race.

Maggie arrived home while I was opening the final item and we nearly killed ourselves laughing. Gender roles are alive and kicking in Moscow…bigtime!

I’ve been around a long time, and no man in his right mind has ever given me an apron! Apparently this is high praise from a Russian male so I won’t smack him with a frying pan; couldn’t reach that high anyway!! 🙂

I’ve been enjoying this entire experience so much I began studying Russian two months ago. Slow going, but I’m getting better at cadence and recognizing which cyrillc syllables are stressed when I see words in print. However, to express yourself well, you REALLY need to understand complicated grammar rules…so I bought these: