The First Icecream in my life

I give up on properly blogging - it appears, there's no way for me to properly blog from my PC; at work I'm supposed to be doing work stuff, and the minute I get home, my desktop is occupied already. Bah. So I must beg your pardon, for I am going to write from my iPhone client, with lack of pictures and perhaps a bit of misspellings. But I wanted to tell you about the Icecream.

I did not eat an real Icecream before I was probably 7, or close enough. There was plenty of Icecream - and good stuff, I've been told - but by the time I was born in 1985, all of the good stuff was mostly gone and people were struggling with finding soap and sugar, save for Icecream.

I wonder, why iPhone Blogger client keeps spelling Icecream with large I all the time?..

At each 1st of May there was a huge celebration on USSR (google it - too long to describe the nature of it here), and by his line of work my father was obliged to take part in it. I am not quite sure what he was doing, according to my mother - mostly drinking with women while she was away, but he had to give a speech or two for the gathering of people on Communist party's behalf. And after one of those, he somehow managed to find us an Icecream.

The weather was already hot and when he got home, the Icecream was already thawing. It was a simple kind, just frozen milk with a bit of sugar and butter in it. Adults got all agitated, they had no Icecream in a while, I gather, and I didn't even knew what it was. Dad insisted on giving it to me right away, but under the assumption that I am a sickly child and should not be eating cold stuff, mom kept waiting until the Icecream completely thawed back to its milk state. Then, I was let to spoon in, not understanding why all the fuss about cool sugary milk. Milk I knew pretty well.

Only a few years after, when USSR collapsed and the country was open to import goods, I ate my first real Icecream. Still remember it pretty well: it was 400gr package 3-in-1, with apple, chocolate and vanilla fillings. We usually shared it with mom, I ate the apple one, she ate the chocolate one, and the vanilla one we ate together, taking turns.

I am often told stories about how great was Icecream in USSR - especially full-cream "пломбир" (plombeer) type, and how you could get full on just one piece of it with 70% fat, but what I will always remember, is some unnamed imported stuff with chemical apple flavor that is not to be sold anywhere anymore.