Following up on the lovely and teary goodbye offered by Bota, I would like to offer my own.

But first, like always, a lesson in lexicon:

The act of saying goodbye is прощание while an actual goodbye is проводы. This is from the word проводи́ть/провожать, which actually means to accompany someone in order to say goodbye to them. Мы проводили ба́бушку с де́душкой на вокза́л We took granny and grandpa to the station. Проводить до до́му to walk someone home. Я проводил её в метро́ I walked her to the subway.

Проща́ться means to say goodbye. If you want to say farewell to someone, you will use this verb (the non-reflexive form) and say проща́й. But I am not saying прощай to any one of you. There is definitely more to come.

I have been writing for this blog for less than a year. The opportunity popped up for me in September of last year and I embraced it with everything I had. Through this incredibly emotional year, I wrote many blogs (actually 22 in total), but I had a lot of fun doing it. Through writing for you, I remembered many good times of my life in Russia, of the journey of over a decade it has taken me to learn it. Let’s take a quick look at what we covered, shall we?

1. My first blog post was thought up at about 10:30AM one weekday morning under oppressive fluorescent lights in an office when I was starved and thinking, how can I make it the next ninety minutes to lunch? I wrote a few other posts about food, including my posts about breakfast time in Russia, as well as some of my favorite Soviet foods that you can find in any Russian store today.
2. We also talked a lot about my favorite topic, which was grammar! I love, love, love grammar! (I know, I’m a bit crazy, aren’t I?) We raced through prefixes for a few verbs, explored prefixes themselves, explored Russian morphology with baby animals, and even I used my own embarrassing mistakes as a teaching tool.
3. I loved covering my favorite topic, which is history. Some of the most read blogs that I posted among the readers of this blog were about history, including my blog about Khrushchev’s great plans for Soviet Kazakhstan.
4. But lastly, it all comes down to the music. This was always my favorite theme to talk about, and I loved stuffing YouTube videos into my posts, which added color and sound to each post, bringing it alive on the screen. We said goodbye to summer with Sofia Rotaru and Alla Pugacheva and even explored some Russian opera through Russian opera stars. And so I leave you now, dear readers, with one of my favorite bittersweet songs from Russian cartoons, Голубой вагон Blue Wagon from the legendary series Чебурашка Cheburashka:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVDkdvEplrQ&t=1s

I wish you all the best and please keep up your efforts to learn Russian, an incredibly rich and beautiful language.

Keep up the good work,

Ryan Green