Lateness

Lateness. I am really late on updating the blog, sorry. this is for Zhenya who keeps bugging me about the fact that we seldom blog. :) today I bought lunch meat at the deli counter of the grocery store. yummy sliced ham. okorok delikatessni. yummy. it was 470 rubles for 1 kilo, comes out to about $15 for 2.2 pounds. it's like virginia honey ham. i thought it was a good deal, but now i am thinking not so much. oops. :) while the worker was slicing it up, i heard the two ladies behind me talking about waiting for guests to arrive at their house. this has been a topic of much interest to me, because tardiness in this country is very normal, but their are definately levels of tardiness. These ladies were saying that if guests come early they get nervous because everything might not be ready. between 15 min to half and hour late is normal and acceptable (especially because so many people rely on public transport and that can be unpredictable). But if it is an hour or more late, they begin to wonder if the guests will show up at all. The conversation made me smile. I was glad that extreme lateness bothered them too, because we had friends in K-town whom we love dearly, but would show up at least an hour and a half late every time we invited them over. This is frustrating when you are trying to serve the food hot!! Even when we moved dinner way up to 5pm, they would show at 6:30pm. It's Russian custom to never show up as a guest without a gift (flowers, etc.) for the hosts or something to go with tea like cake or cookies. So our friends extra lateness was also because they were out shopping for something for dessert even though we told them a million times, dont worry about bringing something. I guess I will never be able to change that! Oh well, it is nice to have something yummy that I didn't have to go to the store for.