So this is what Vielikie Luki Looks like

We made a road trip, on a 2 lane highway to, Pskov, Vieliki Luki, and the Latvian Border. It was exhausting! Loki, Larisa, Myself and Peter crammed in a small "sedan" Hyundai Solaris. The first 4 hours were miserable because we had no music. The next 4 and a half hours were worse because we were listening to Dub-Step.
We arrived in Velikie Luki to a delicious dinner of: mushrooms, onions (mixed in canola oil), herring (in oil), potatoes with canola oil to add to them. Most meals involved, canola oil and salt, in heavy pours. Great Grandpa Alexander doused loki in a heavy spray of Sultan Akbar. Great Grandpa's sexy man cologne. Great Grandpa tends to eat a lot of garlic and salt. He also prefers his banya, most older russians prefer the banya, or sauna as we call it at this time after all the Ellis Island mash-ups. I am not sure the frequency of the sauna usage, or showering/bathing frequency in general for most Russian citizens.
We then went shopping in what used to be an open air market, yes even in the winter, and has now switched to some in buildings/large gymnasium type buildings. Which was now holding meat stands, and various other stands. The meat stands were pretty freaky, lots and lots of meat stands. I had a memory of open air markets in Mexico. Which makes sense, except of course the meat stands, which an open air meat stand is always creepy. You could buy shoes, under wear, and plastic bags at the open air markets. Oh yeah want to bag your groceries that's about 3 rubles=.10, eating at mcdonalds or Hesburger and want ketchup with your fries that's 15 rubles=.50. This is why you go through so much paper currency in a day. I used my first 1000 ruble bill today at the grocery store. It's very surreal to see people walking around with 10k ruble in their pocket(books). But I digress.
So we ate a fabulous dinner of salt and canola oil, with "mystery" meat (possibly beef/cow but what part? Who knows?!), and rice and 20 cloves of garlic. What did it need, spices! Only "spice" that was used was salt and garlic. Copius amounts of garlic, and copius amounts of garlic, not a clove but a large bulb (?)
On the way around Vielikie Luki, we met Yuri Something-hof, who was able to shoot down/blow up three amerikanskiy vietnam related air missle base things. I missed that part, but it was something pretty impressive. Yeah that was exciting, I heard amerikanskiy several times during our weekend with Alexander. 
More to come later...