So we got up today again at 9 a.m. It’s a lovely, sunny Moscow day and the Lenins and Stalins are still hanging out in the area of Red Square, which, sadly is still closed.

I swung into the post office to buy a stamp. Each trip I try to buy a random stamp for my daughter and her teacher. They are usually cheap, unique and don’t take up room in a suitcase. My daughter now has France, Djibouti, Tunisia and will soon add Russia. I walked in, and without having any clue for the Russian words for mailing something, merely said the Russian word for “two” and I suppose she sold me two Russian airmail stamps. It cost me a little more than a dollar. But I paid with the equivalent of a twenty, so the clerk “huffed” under her breath and had to leave the room to make change. She made it a point to huff a second time as she counted it out to me. I was very
pleased with myself.

I went to a souvenir shop to buy a little something for my daughter. I won’t say what because she does like her surprises. It cost 150 rubles. I put 200 rubles up and the clerk shook her head. I sorted through my coins. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty… she counted as I counted. But I didn’t have another. I only have forty. She waved at me and said in Russian that ten rubles was nothing to worry about.

That also seemed like a win.

Red Square will definitely be closed all week. But we have gone down every day to see what we can see.

From there, we decided to begin our daily walk. We tend to wander with a loose goal in mind. Pushkin Café has been on M’s list because of the 1964 French song, “Nathalie.”

Today we finally found it.

This is not it.

Neither is this, but this was next door.

And then voilà, this IS it.

The menu

Of course all we wanted was chocolate. And it was heavenly.