After traveling to places in the last year like Egypt and China where I listen to the language and honestly can't even tell where one word starts and the next one begins - let alone decipher any meaning whatsoever... it's surprisingly easy to get along in Moscow with zero Russian language knowledge at all. There are certain tricks that any experienced traveler knows (such as buffet restaurants can be your best friend), and many of people at least in urban Moscow actually speak pretty good English. But as strange looking as the Cyrillic alphabet is to the English speaker's eye it's actually not that complex. There's a one to one mapping of many characters to our alphabet, and if you simply ignore the extra letters they have (Cyrillic has 32 letters) - you can sound out the word and hazard a pretty good guess at what's the meaning much of the time. Between Raffy's Swiss-German, my (abysmal) Spanish, and our collective English - there's plenty of overlap with Russian nouns if you keep it phonetic. (see above how "coffee" translates... circle with a line through sounds like "fee").Anyway back to California tomorrow - excited to not have to wear six layers of clothes to head outside in minus 10 C weather! What a great trip!
