до свидания Россия

I apologize for the lack of posts this week - it's been a busy week with preparing for our close meeting and trip home. We have just finished our close meeting and are leaving the office - this 4 kilometer walk home will be our last. The trip has been great and the experience has totally blown my mind. I look forward to seeing everyone next week!

здесь мы приходим Коннектикут!

Picture with the monkey...

...it'll cost you. This woman was charging people to take a picture with the monkey so I waited until she looked the other way to snap a picture of this "attraction". Only in Russia...

Bread

Over the weekend we took a stroll down to Red Square to check out the open air market. I noticed the breads below:

PIGS:

FISH:MISC:

Russian Goldfish

A few members of the team walked to the local grocery store over the weekend to view the store presence of the Russian product. During their stay, they saw and purcahsed the product in the

"Grinder" Flat

Bread please...

Russian lesson of the day - a restaurant is a pectopah

If you go out to a restaurant they will not bring bread or water to your table without you asking. If asked they do not bring a loaf or a few slices rather they bring an assortment of mini-loaves (see picture below). The bread in the picture is Sesame, Asiago cheese, Wheat and a 4th which I was unable to decifer. We have found the bread out here is much more dense and less moist than the bread we are used to.

Really Cool Bike

Picture taken in St. Petersburg - anyone have an idea how he got up on that bike?!?

Leningrad Train Station

Russian Lesson of the day - Moscow is pronounced Makba.

The name of train station in Moscow that has the trains to St. Petersburg (prior name was Leningrad) is called the Leningrad Train Station. The train station in St. Petersburg that has the trains to Moscow is called the Makba station. Below is a picture taken within the Leningrad Train Station.

The picture below was taken in the the Makba Train Station - on the wall is the train map to get around the Greater Moscow Region.

Buffalo Sabers

Even people in St. Petersburg are fans of the Buffalo Sabres.

St. Petersburg Russia

This weekend I took a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia. It is a 500 mile trip one way and takes a little over 4 hours on a train. Arriving late on Friday night allowed me to have a full day of sights on Saturday. My first sight was a visit to Peterhof Palace which was the property of Peter the Great, founder of St. Petersburg.

Fact - St Petersburg was once called Leningrad from 1924-1991.

Fact - It used to be the capital of Russia until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The 2nd sight was St. Isaac's Catherdral which is one of the world's largest and most ornate catherdrals.

Our 3rd site was the Peter & Paul Fortress - St. Petersburg first settlement.

On Sunday we had time to visit one of the most famous museums in St. Petersburg - The Hermitage. They boast over 3 million pieces of art dating from several centuries BC up to the 18th century. The picture below is taken from the left side of the Hermitage building (pictured above).

The image below is of the "gold room" in the Hermitage Museum.

Russian Deli Flat

The picture below was taken at lunch in the office last week. The sandwich came on thin bread whose appearance & texture reminded me of our Deli Flats...but the shape of this bread (not as easy to see in the picture as I had hoped) resembled a hoagie (grinder/hero/wedge depening on where in the country you are from) rather than just being a circle. The bread's width was the same as a deli flat, but it was roughly 5 inches in length making it more of an oval.

Extra Moscow Pictures

The first picture is of red sqaure. On the right is the Kremlin with Lenin's tomb in front of it. In the back is St. Basil's Catherdral.

This building once served as a jail for the KGB and has since been turned into a KGB Museum.

Russian Lesson

Skullko - how much?
Chut - check (to be used to ask for the dinner check)
Spaseeba - thank you.
Adeen - 1
Dva - 2
Tre - 3
More russian to come later...

Stalin Towers

Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death and the fall of communism, holds a great presence in Moscow's architectural history. After the end of WWII he declared that the skyline of Moscow was very small and lacked the beauty that he saw in the city. As a result, he commissioned the building of 7 skyscrapers to be built to rival those in the United States. To distinguish these towers apart from those in the States, he said that every tower should have a golden spire. While there have been several skyscrapers built since then, the 7 towers (or 7 Sisters as they are called) still highlight the Moscow skyline. Today the 7 Sisters are the location of the following sites:
1) Moscow State University
2) Ministry of Foreign Affairs

3) Ministry of Transport
4) Hotel Ukraina
5) Hotel Leningradskaya
6) Kudrinskaya Square
7) Kotelnicheskaya Embankment

The hotel we are staying in is the Hilton Moscow Leningradskaya (#5 in the list above - see picture taken on Sunday).

Jetlag

This morning started at dusk when jetlag got the best of me and woke me up at 5 am Moscow time. When going back to sleep failed, I convinced/tricked myself into a trip to the gym to get the day started right. Breakfast with the audit team was shortly there after - fresh fruit & local breads was a nice treat. The hotel had cars waiting outside to take us to the Campbell's office at 8.30 Moscow time. The office is just 1 floor in an office building (perfect size for an office of 55 people) and has a full restaurant and cafeteria in the building. CSC Russia introduced their first product "Domasnaya Klassika" (a broth) in November 2007. They have recently introduced a new product line, called Zapravka which is produced and distributed by 3rd party vendors. Next week we have a session lined up to view the production facility and to taste the Russian product.

Moscow - Day 1

Fun bits of knowledge:
- Red Square received it's name from an adjective used to describe St. Basil's Cathedral. The Russian word Krasnaya stands for "beautiful" and is the same word for "red". The Cathedral was always described as beautiful, enough so that it was eventually used to describe the entire area that is now called Red Square.

- The Moscow Metro system is the 2nd most used public transportation in the world, behind only Tokyo. The stops are beautiful and are decroated with chandeliers, stained glass, ect. I took a picture of the Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya metro stop yesterday while on a trip back from Red Square.

Welcome to Moscow

Alright, so we made it. A few windy hours and a trip around the "volcanic ash" and we made it. Landed at 2.00 pm Moscow Time (6:00 AM Eastern). After checking in, I met up with the CSC Audit Team for a quick trip down to Red Square. Unfornately the parade (with tanks and missiles) had finished hours earlier, but being able to see the square without fog was a once in a lifetime event. Red Square is not as big as you would think, but you can imagine how important it would be historically.


If anyone has a desire/request that I am not taking a picture of/blogging about, please let me know. I would prefer this to be a give and take blog as the time here might be a little busy.