Russia – A Multitude of Musings

Hi everyone. I haven’t touched this blog in over a week, but thankfully have been doing okay. Today, I’m joining Share Your World. Here goes.

1. When you retire (or when you retired) do you have a picture of a small cottage with a white picket fence outside in a quiet village or something similar?
I honestly wasn’t fully sure at first what Di meant with this question. Do I have a picture? No. I have just one physical picture in my home and that one is of myself. Oh wait, she meant whether we envision ourselves living in a small cottage blah blah. Well, I for one don’t. I’m not technically retired, in that I’m not of retirement age and, since I never worked, I still consider that age (which by the time I reach it is probably mid-70s) the cut-off point for retirement. I don’t honestly envision myself ever living in a small cottage. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll live in a care home forever.

2. What do you associate with school dinners (apart from school of course)?
I envision another post in the making, as I can talk up a storm about school lunches. We didn’t get a cooked meal at my schools. Well, I did a few times when I’d be having after-school activities. I remember one such meal, a dish called “hete bliksem” in Dutch, which is basically a stew of mashed potatoes, apples and bacon. I detested it!

3. Can you play a musical instrument?
No, not at all. I took lessons learning to play keyboards at the training center for the blind when I was 19, but really didn’t get beyond the absolute basics. I have forgotten all of it since. Like I’ve also probably shared before, I took a few guitar lessons when at summer camp in Russia in 2000, but it took me the whole first lesson to figure out what the instructor, who spoke only English and Russian, meant by the “strings”.

4. What made you smile today?
My being able to teach one of the student staff here about care profiles and him appreciating my “lesson”. Care profiles are the care packages and associated budget each client in long-term care is allocated. I really loved perseverating on a topic I know a lot about without it personally affecting me at that very moment (because the student staff isn’t the one making decisions about my care).

Another thing that made me smile today is being able to describe the above image, which Di used for the optional gratitude section, directly from the web through my screen reader. I think I somewhat agree with the sentiment expressed in the quote too. At least, in my case, life may not always get better, but I do get to experience good days at every age.

Hi everyone. A lot is still on my mind, but today, I’d like to write a lighthearted post. Thanks to John Holton, who provides the Writer’s Workshop prompts, I now have several ideas. One is to write about my first airplane trip. Let me share.

My first airplane trip was also my first trip abroad and my first vacation without my parents. It was a trip from Schiphol (Amsterdam) airport to Moscow on August 4, 2000. I was flying Aeroflot, a relatively okay Russian airline. Still, everyone clapped when the airplane landed successfully, something I recently found out stopped in the 1970s with Western airlines.

One thing I remember quite distinctly is the horrible pain in my ears and head in general during takeoff and landing. I haven’t flown in years, but the memories came back when my spouse reminded me about it, having had a similar experience on a recent airplane trip. Honestly, I can’t imagine people actually taking pictures while the plane is taking off or coming down.

I still did have a tiny amount of vision back in 2000, so remember looking at the clouds once the aircraft had fully risen.

I also to this day remember the film playing in the airplane. Not that I could understand any part of it, as it was in Russian, but my fellow travelers explained to me that it was called something like “I want to go to prison”. The plot revolved around a Russian character who had heard that, in Dutch prisons, inmates get their own TV etc. (something that isn’t exactly true, by the way), so he wanted to flee to the Netherlands even if it meant going to prison. I bet nowadays this film wouldn’t be considered appropriate.