STRETCHING SO MUCH - FAR AND WIDE

Many people know I spend a lot of time stretching each morning (some say too much) .

It's good for the body and mind; literally stretching both. I liken it to the old days when walking my dog, Althea, spurred many good news articles. You just never know what will come to you during these moments.

So as I was stretching this morning and once again listening to WFMT, I was pleased to hear the station  promote the upcoming program: Russian Accents.

At 11:00 p.m. Chicago time on Tuesday night (8:00 a.m. Wednesday Moscow time), I heard a man with an accent talking excitedly about a composer. The announcer came on and said that the speaker was Alexander Toradze, of the Toradze Studio based at I.U. in South Bend, talking about Rachmaninov. Before I had to get in the shower, John Botkin played a Rachmaninov piece and there was an interview with a consultant to the studio.

Language classes are somewhat interesting. I am learning things, but there is a huge disparity between the two British gals and Phillip and me. It's hard to read and speak the language when you don't know what the letters are.

Dimitri, our teacher, is getting frustrated with the British ladies, too, and that doesn't help anyone. While I question the amount of what I am learning, the answer is that there is value in the human interaction, having Dimitri correct my pronunciation and the picking up of little tidbits of the language I might never have gained.

Tuesday, Andrea and I went to the Lenin Library. I studied Russian while she conducted her research. Later, we took the metro out to Kievskaya and walked around. Wow. There is a ton of new construction out that way, and the wealth along Bolshaya Dorogomovskaya Ulitza and Kutuzovsky Prospekt is impressive. I would have guessed that far from the city center and on the other side of the river, I would just see huge concrete housing blocks.

After a lot of walking (and just now seeing from the map how much we missed), we hopped back on the metro to our neighborhood, Arbatskaya. Famished and parched, we simply stopped in at the Yolki-Palki for dinner. It's not nearly as nice as "our" Yolki-Palki in Petersburg, and there was no dancing!