Vera

It may be hard to believe, but language barriers have never really been a problem for us in the collating of dishes for this book. On arrival into Moscow, we were armed only with Google Translate to make conversation with friendly taxi drivers (the first one offered us almonds on the way to the hotel and another gave us a tour of central Moscow, interjecting with little-known facts about the buildings we whizzed by). En route to Vera Petrovna, the bus driver even stopped the bus, came to our seat at the back and double checked on our map that she was taking us to the right place.