Mr. Helper

This little man is right at home in the kitchen! He spent all morning grinding bell peppers for his dad's favorite adjika. He nibbled, we chatted, and he provided a running commentary on his safety practices - "See Mom, I'm only putting my fingers in here when I'm NOT turning the handle."

Monastery continued

Well, it wasn't actually a monastery. My mistake. At one end there is a church dating to the 17th century, and the low, white buildings circling the large quad made up the Tsar's residence. Peter the Great lived here when he was young. The church and residence are on a man-made island in the middle of Silver Pond in the Izmailovo district. I'm not sure how people made islands back then. That would be interesting to find out. But for the historically minded, Peter the Great supposedly found an English sailboat on the island and paddled around the pond on it, which inspired him to establish the Russian navy.

A friend of ours has his office in a reconstructed wing of the old residence and he invited us to a birthday picnic for his son.

The grilled meat, eggplants and tomatoes were wonderful. After we ate, Zig and I took a walk around the island and found an exhibition of glazed tiles from the 17th and 18th centuries.

So here are the pictures:

Photos Galore!

Okay, I'm still trying to figure out how to move pictures around in my posts.

The first picture is Zig, his cousin Rob and his aunt Masha. We took the boys to the Victor Vasnetsov Museum in Moscow to see pictures of knights and fairy tale dragons. The next picture is Rob and his dad, Big Sergei.

Then you see Zig with his new Cyrillic alphabet magnets. He wrote "fuselage" and "bread." He told me he wrote fuselage just because he wanted to, but he wrote bread because he wanted me to cut him some bread and put butter and honey on it. The honey here is thick and wonderful. We bought a jar at the market and when we opened it, it had half a bee floating in it. We decided that was a marketing ploy ("our honey's so fresh..."). But who knows?

Then there's the view from the car as we drove through Sergeiv Posad on our way to see the house Big Sergei is building.

The picture of Zig on the swing is right before he did a half-pipe on his bike.

This is where we were today. More pictures of this monastery to follow, so stay tuned...