WINTER WONDERS

This was a glorious clear, cold evening and the photo opportunities made me late for meeting up with Mike. Who could resist this though?

MUSHROOM PARTY

We enjoyed last Saturday night at the home of a work colleague of Mike's. Last autumn Mike had the opportunity to go mushroom hunting with a gang from the office, this particular chap being the expert only collected porchini, and a big basket of those he had found. He invited us on Saturday to enjoy risotto a la porchini. He had boiled the mushrooms and had then frozen them. Gosh! I didn't know that was even a possibility as I have only ever enjoyed porchini either fresh or dried. We enjoyed a couple of bottles of excellent Georgian wine which was a great treat as, naturally, Georgian wine is not allowed into Russia. This was very generous as the said gentleman had only a couple of bottles brought in from Ukraine. Of course he hadn't realised that he was not allowed to bring it through.

He had a wonderful flat, the first flat I have been into belonging to a local, albeit a rather privileged local. He did warn us, however, that he had been having trouble with rats since the Restaurant had opened beneath him. I kept my feet pretty much off the ground for the entire visit.

This guy also had the most impressive private library, probably, in the City. During the early 90's there had been a charity to gather up as much reading material, mostly from USA as was possible and send it to the literature starved Russians. Somehow, he had acquired a huge number of these books, some of real historical interest. He also had some magazines dated from the 60's which were, according to him, published and printed in Russia and sold, legally, through the news kiosks. They were in Russian but were all about the wonders of living in the USA. I think he is quite wrong about this. I think these were definitely printed in the USA and smuggled into Russia to be sold quite secretly. After all, they were would really make any Russian very envious of the lifestyle outside of the Soviet Union and why would they allow that? I was in Russia in the 70's and I know people had hardly any information about anything outside.

We enjoyed looking at some childhood artwork which included a 'City of the Future' containing glorious Soviet slogans! Really that brainwashing business started very early.