When leaving the hotel, I left a good tip for Zoya, the girl who helped with phonecalls for me, and many groceries for the maid (a product of not getting kicked out of the stores). I had hoped for some time to wander around and take some pictures, especially after the new snowfall, but I didn’t have the time. I went to bed much too late and slept much too late, of course. Yesterday was a good day. Well, besides hearing about nana having a heart attack! Yulja went everywhere with me; back to the grocery store to finish it up without problems, to the automobile store for tires (the lady working there spoke English and was super nice!) to the real estate agent, to a couple malls…so I took her out for dinner in the end. She made everything so much faster for me and said things like “I’m not going to leave you until the end because I feel responsible for you”, and I got a bunch of “is it OK if I ask you a question?” and the question would be something simple like, “are you married? I wanted to ask you since we first had our meeting. Why aren’t you married?” Etc. Etc. She is 21 and just got married, with beautiful blue eyes that make you wonder if she’s wearing special makeup so that they stand out. Bright red hair. Pretty girl, very nice girl. She can speak English very well but has a much harder time hearing and understanding it. She was one of the few reasons I had a decent time in Yuzhno. 2 days ago, we mastered the supermarkets together, we even had the security guard that was pacing the alcohol section helping us out with finding wine brand after wine brand. He didn’t question what we were doing and even recommended a good wine/alcohol from time to time. Little did he know I had my precious voice recorder held so stealthily under my scarf. I love my voice recorder. It is my new momentary favorite thing. At one point, Yulja said to me, he likes you. He was recommending certain bottles, he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t like you. My response was, good! Less chance I’ll get kicked out. In the grocery store, I ran into a lady from Texas. I asked if she was an expat and she said no, we are retired teachers who moved here to teach English. I didn’t want to offend her but I wanted to ask her… what?? Why? If I was moving from my hometown, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk would not be my top choice.
We had a traditional Russian lunch together at a new restaurant that was set up cafeteria style, I had traditional soup, salmon covered with cheese, some rice with lamb in it, and a typical Russian dessert made from cottage cheese with a dash of sour cream on top. It was a lot of food, but it was good. Yulja didn’t feel well after the 2nd grocery store, so we decided to finish the next day. I trekked on through the driving rain, snow and darkness alone to some of the other locations I needed to get to. Finally, enough was enough and I was soaked through. I went to Mishka pub for dinner in the basement of the hotel and grabbed some fish and some Russian baltika beer. I didn’t know the difference between two choices (of baltika) so I asked which one was the best and they ended up giving me one of each because they couldn’t understand me. Someone asked me in English, probably an expat, if I was doing homework and I said “something like that”. I didn’t explain further this time. Maybe because I didn’t want to be up all night.
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