June 5, 2012 Day trip to Pscov

Today we went to Pskov.  It is the capitol of the region where Velikiye Luki is located. The reason we went is because Lewis had to pick his work visa up personally.  (Even though he is a consultant, he will be here longer than 30 days so a work visa is necessary)  It is not typical to pick the work visa up personally, but they wanted to meet him and hand it to him personally because he is the first American Specialist to be in Velikiye Luki and they know that he will make a big difference and contribution in the agricultural field here.  We did not know what to expect out of this presentation and it was basically over with before I knew it had even started so these are the only 2 pictures I got.  There was a lady taking pictures so hopefully we will get a better one eventually.

Afterwards we went to find the church building in Pskov.  This is how it looks and the sign on the entrance door.

While we were driving around trying to find a place to eat that wasn't too expensive we drove past this building which is one of the places that Lewis boss, the owner of the company, works.  His boss wears many hats as we have discovered.  This is a government building and he holds a position in the agricultural deptartment.

Here are a few videos of Pskov, as we were driving around.  It is a much busier place than Velikiye Luki.

We decided to just drive out of town a little bit and stopped at a restaurant that didn't cost as much as the ones in the city.  I did not take a picture of this, sorry, but one of the "hard things to get used to" in Russia is their bathrooms.  Sometimes you go to a place that has a room, if you are lucky, and basically a hole in the floor and as Konstantine put it....."You go in and do what you got to do and come out".  I guess kind of like an outhouse only it is not where you sit down.  You basically take a stance and squat and go.  This restaurant had such a restroom outside.  We decided to wait until after we ate and went down the road to a gas station.
In the eating area of the restaurant they had a TV on the wall.  Lewis made the comment that this was the biggest TV he had seen since being here (obviously we are not around TV much anymore).  I took a brief video of a commercial and a news show.  Then they changed the channel to some music......not really a good idea, these guitar players looked like they wanted to fall asleep.  Very interesting viewing!!!

At this restaurant we had meat and potatoes, which are usually boiled or pureed (mashed), but this place had "fried" potaotes, or as we call french fries, so we tried them.....not too bad!!  These are the first fries we have had since the "5 Guys Restaurant" in the Washington DC Airport May 10th.

On our drive the rest of the way back to Velikiye Luki we had to stop for several minutes twice for construction traffic.  It seems that when there is traffic backed up cars just drive up on the shoulder and stop to talk to each other and walk around to find out what the back up is all about etc.  So even though this looks like an accident, it is just a bunch of cars piled around and drivers talking to each other and who knows what else.........