Grass and Dandelions

During the 6 days that we were in St. Petersburg, the grass, trees, bushes, and flowers all grew in Moscow at a speed with which I had never encountered before. We came back, and our little area around the apartment looked COMPLETELY different. The grass had grown 5 or six inches or so (so, I guess you really could have sat around and watched the grass grow!), or perhaps it simply seemed that way because of the mixture of “weeds” and grass that make up the grass here, and weeds, of course, always grow so much faster than the grass.

On a side note about this, we noticed that on our main street by our apartment--Марии Ульяновой (pronounced Mar-ee Oo-lee-ah-no-voi, for those of you non Cyrillic types)--which has a nice little park which divides the two different lanes of traffic, that there were tons of dandelions growing in the grass there, which now is at least 6-8 inches tall. Nothing was being done about it, and it only became clear why when I read a news article (from the same The Moscow News) which said, “After all, even weeds are considered flowers in Russia, and in the summertime children wear tediously woven diadems of dandelions.” AHA! Can’t mow flowers!! It is now all sort of starting to make sense!

Addendum 1: Maria Uleanovoi (not quite sure how you spell that last name in English from the Cyrillic) was the brother of Lenin. Hence, she gets a street in Moscow named after her!

Addendum 2: Julie and I, as we were walking to the little grocery store across the street actually saw one of those dandelion crowns being made. I wish I’d had my camera around. Very pretty, but very intricate. I would guess that there were no less than 200 flowers on the halfway finished diadem. But, looking around by the bench that they were working on, their supply wasn’t going to run out any time soon!