Wanna know my favorite thing to do in new places? Go to the grocery store. Seriously. If you want to see what's really up just take a look at what the locals are eating. The supermarket in Novorossiysk was equal parts amazing and appalling. There was a very large selection of food....lots of baked goods....lots of treats....lots of 'wod-ka'....

BUT. Check out their produce:

Slightly appalling, no? Maybe it is just the sassy Hilo Farmers Market shopper coming out....but seriously, produce shouldn't look like this in the supermarket!

They did however have a pretty awesome selection of fresh fish.

I just wish that I could read the signs to tell what type of fish we're looking at. I think I will pretty much always classify fresh fish as awesome.

Wanna know what else was awesome? The supermarket was a couple of stories. They had one of those really cool flat escalators...the kind where you push your cart onto it and it immediately stops because the conveyer is grooved. I didn't know this. So I got super excited about pushing the cart and start running with it lining myself up for the conveyer. My travel buddy says, 'uh, I don't think you want to do that'.....it was just a little bit too late....I go barreling onto the conveyer and get stopped in my tracks coming to a screeching halt and slamming myself into the cart handle.....if I had been going any faster I might have given myself whiplash. Note to self: Grocery stores know that if they don't groove the belt some idiot will try to run as fast as they can up the conveyer with a cart.

As I wrote this it dawned on me that the grooves are equally important for the trek down the conveyer belt....

One more thing requires documentation. I sorta ruined my Ugg boots. They're not exactly ruind but they'll never be the same. I didn't really have any appropriate footwear for a day in the snow (other than my leather work boots) so, I rocked my Uggs however; they were suede and not meant to get super wet. (Honestly, this always cracks me up about Uggs....why design the warmest boot ever and make the majority of the styles available completely impractical for winter usage?) Needless to say, even though my boots were wet my feet were warm....and I can still sport the boots....they're just not quite as fuzzy looking on the outside.

I think that spending a day in Russia with warm feet is a really good justification for ruining boots!

So there you have it. Ammmmazzing and Apppallling!