I’ve been taking an introductory Russian class all month at work. We meet for an hour every day, and the focus has been on things like learning the Cyrillic alphabet, numbers, greetings, days of the week, months of the year, how to tell time, and basic vocabulary. One of the guys in the class latched onto the word for cookies: печенья. (You may or may not be able to see the Cyrillic there; it might depend on your computer.) The word is pronounced sort of like “peh-chain-ya.” He always says he wants some cookies, and joked that he would give our teacher bad ratings on her evaluation since she never brought in any cookies.
In other news, my mom got us an awesome KitchenAid stand mixer for Christmas, which arrived in its standard box — with pictures of the mixer plastered all over the side — despite Macy’s telling her it would be in a plain box. Since I already knew what it was, I asked Mom if I could go ahead and open it! She said it was up to us and I intended to wait…but it was too tempting! Last night, I decided to test out the mixer on a batch of chocolate chip cookies so I could take some печенья to Russian class this morning! It’s our last week of class and we’ve all been in a good mood with the holidays coming up. (And the mixer was really fun to use and did make the cookie process go a bit faster. I’ve always just stirred by hand, but the mixer made it easy peasy.)
So I walked into class this morning with the bowl of cookies under my arm, very pleased with myself for bringing the oft-discussed snack. As I put the bowl down on the table, I noticed two other plates full of cookies.
The other guy had brought cookies.
AND the teacher had brought cookies.
All THREE of us had brought cookies to class!
We munched on a variety of печенья as we went over colors and numbers and talked about cultural differences. (The class also focuses on that since the reason most people are taking the language is because they will be interacting with Russians on NASA’s behalf.) It was hilarious and totally awesome.
What a great story! I love that so many of you brought cookies in – hilarious. And I’m mildly jealous of your mixer (ok, scratch that … really jealous)
I took Russian for two years in high school and two years in college, and went to Russia when I was a junior in high school. I love the language. I wish I had more reason to keep up with it. The Cyrillic alphabet is so gorgeous, and the language is so much fun to speak. Like печенья, one of my very favorite words was мороженое – ice cream. Fun to say *and* eat! I’d never learned the word for cookies, though!