Knock, Knock, Who's There?

There is something odd we have run into since we have been here. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or not, but the Russians walk right into our house, often without so much as a knock.

It's a mite unsettling to turn around and suddenly have a Russian man standing in your kitchen babbling to you about something, which is exactly what happened the other day.

Shane was gone for the day. I was washing dishes at the sink and subconsciously noticed a man walk across the driveway through the view of the window. Not thinking much of it, I continued to wash. A moment later, the front door slammed and I turned around to see an middle-aged man turn the corner and walk into my kitchen. He kept talking to me in Russian, even though I stared at him blankly and helplessly shrugged my shoulders. I just kept saying "I don't understand" [я не понимаю] which is so far the only complete sentence I know. I kept trying to direct him outside to the office building, but enough time had passed with him trying to talk to me, that the security guard had made it to our house and answered the man's questions and escorted him out of our house. I locked the doors the rest of the day.

I asked an interpreter later if that there was a rhyme or reason to people just walking in without knocking, and she was confused as I was. She said in the villages visitors knock first and wait to be let in. So, it is still a mystery as to why they walk into our house at the farm unannounced.

We have talked to the construction people that are continually working on our house and they typically give a quick knock AND THEN walk in. The knock is a nice warning, however short it is. I try to just meet them at the door so that it doesn't traumatize my girls when one of them walks out of the bedroom smack into a foreign-speaking stranger. But I have been caught off-guard before. After having a late night of visiting with family back home on the phone, I went to bed and woke up to Rain telling me there were people in the house. Always an awkward moment, especially when they come looking for you if you don't immediately appear.

Although drinking is not allowed on the job, smoking is another story. The construction crew was working on our house again the other day and among the 10 or so workers, one of them was smoking every 5 minutes, directly next to our open windows. [Russian cigarettes stink worse than American ones.] So I went outside with my handy-dandy Russian traveling companion book and in my broken, laughable Russian, I asked them to please not smoke around my house and my children. They were polite and after that, they would smoke across the road by their shuttle van. 

They are respectful and always try to get my girls to smile. The girls found a small section of our driveway that had some sand in it and were playing "garden". Some of the workers who were hauling sand to build up around our house, saw the girls playing in their small pile of sand and hauled two wheelbarrow-fulls for the girls to play in. Another one gave them a ride in the wheelbarrow around the house.

The Girls' Garden.
Shane took this picture one night after he came home from work. The girls are always worried he will drive over their garden.

Playing in the Garden

A much bigger-sized sand pile

Perfect decorations always at our fingertips

Castle and dolls eating

Rain getting a wheelbarrow ride

Mesa being "brave". She even told me afterwards she was "so brave to go for a ride." This is true for two reasons: 1. Going for a ride in a wheelbarrow all by herself, and 2. Getting the ride from a stranger.