Guus Bosman

When I put Nora in the car tonight she said: "zebra! zebra!" and she pointed to our neighbor's fence. I was wondering what she meant: did she mean a striped pattern of shadows? And then I saw it...

We went to pick up Sasha and when we parked at home I asked Nora to tell mama about the zebra. Nora pointed again to the fence and said: "zebra! zebra!" Sasha kept looking for the zebra but couldn't find it.

Nora is starting to learn the letters of the alphabet and Lelya Snezha teaches those letters with names. So there is 'м' for мама, 'O' for Oma and 'т' for тати (that's me). She is learning the Cyrillic letters, so she knows that Я is for ягода (strawberry). When she saw the letter R on a box, she told me: ягода. I explained that this was the R -- and the first word that came to my mind was rommel so I said "de R voor Rommel". She misheard that and the next day said "R voor Trommel", which she then later correctly translated as "барабани"...

So tonight, she saw the З for Зебра...

Saturday morning we went for a walk in the Bluemont Junction Park where we saw the red caboose ("het rode wagonnetje", in Dutch). Nora just read a book about the caboose and it was nice to see a real one. Bluemont Junction used to be a railway junction, before the rails were converted into trails.

In the afternoon we went to a Korean supermarket in Falls Church. They have a great selection of fruits and vegetables. For example they carry 8 different types of pears and many different types of cabbage.

We had dinner there, Korean dishes combined with some salmon sushi. Nora enjoyed eating from all of it. She used chopsticks for the first time and got a fair amount of attention from the Korean ladies working there.