Tea

Dasha, Galia and Kolia sitting down for tea in St. Petersburg

Besides sleeping, I think that the activity I spent the most time doing in Russia was drinking tea. Tea is the non-alchoholic social bonding alternative to vodka, and is the only thing you can really drink (unless you want to drink boiled water) if you don’t want to be poisoned by Moscow’s less-than-clean water.

I drank tea every morning along with breakfast (sometimes I even had two cups), then usually had tea with my lunch. Sometimes we would stop in the afternoon for another cup of tea, and then I always had tea (or honey water) after dinner. That totals to at least 3 cups of tea a day.

I used to think that drinking tea was a waste of time. But now I realize that it’s a great way to get to know people, and to discuss and understand events in life. Tea is a great excuse to eat candy, or to make blini. Tea is how we come to understand why the traffic is so bad, what the weather will be like, and what we will be doing tomorrow. It is a time when you aren’t doing anything really, just sitting, talking, thinking. What a great time. I’ve found that I haven’t had any tea time in Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh I am always doing, I haven’t had time to just sit down and think. I miss that about my time in Moscow.