Making Pilmeni and Blini

Turns out that I had a very interesting evening tonight. One of the students at our University is crazy about English. He asked one of the teachers if he would be able to study with me next year (my American teaching methods are creating quite a stir amongst the students - we 'played' market in class to talk about money and they just couldn't believe that we played a game to learn instead of me just talking to them). Anyway - I digress. So Tatiana told him that I wouldn't be here for him to study with me 'on the second course' (which I only barely recognized as sounding strange in English). So he invited me over for an evening of Russian culture with he and some of his friends.

We made homemade pilmeni and blini (pilmeni are the traditional food of Russia - a type of dumpling - although I'd say closer to Chinese potstickers than dumplings -- and blini are very thin, very tasty (um.. I mean delicious) pancakes). I started off rolling the dough for the pilmeni, and eventually I graduated to actually folding the dough around the meat. We boiled them as the staple of dinner. Tasty! And we also had fried eggplant with mayo and garlic -- spicy, but really nice.

They had lots of questions for me (we spoke in English for the first couple hours and then I broke down and started speaking Russian with them -- they really wanted to practice). They wanted to talk about politics, education, American teens, music - and they were especially surprised to learn that Americans are not like the movies. I asked them if Russians were like Russians in American movies (of course not) so why would Americans be the same? It was a good talk.

They gave me some Russian music to listen to on my computer and they all were REALLY excited to meet with me again. I hope that it has potential to develop into a relationship where they might start coming to our center. They're really cool kids. They want to show me some classic Russian films. One of them is called something like the 'white desert'? I think anyway.

It was really interesting to meet some brand new people and to have a chance to just listen a lot. I learned a lot of new words (but I did refuse when they wanted to teach me a bunch of curse words). They kept it clean for me. And they already knew that I wasn't interested in drinking. Word travels fast.