By Randy Erickson of the Tribune staff

   While their peers are working summer jobs, taking family vacations or just kicking back with their friends, six La Crosse area students will spend three weeks this summer half a world away in Dubna, Russia.
   The six are taking part in the seventh high-school exchange with La Crosse's Russian sister city. The La Crosse area students will stay with families in Dubna, next summer they will return the favor by hosting their Russian host students in the La Crosse area for three weeks.
   The group includes three Aquinas High School juniors - Dana Barbour, Jared Leis and Kelly Morrison - as well as Central High School junior Augie Weber, Logan High School sophomore Joanna Hilton and Holmen High School sophomore Jessica Ness.
   Four of them gathered at Morrison's house for a recent Friday night taste of Russia, courtesy of Anna Soloveva, a Dubna native who studied this year at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
   Soloveva, who took part in the La Crosse-Dubna exchange as a high school student in 1996 and was a chaperone last year, has been tutoring the students on the Russian language.
   The Dubna families hosting the exchange will be fairly fluent in English, Soloveva said, and it would be essential to know Russian. Still, she said, "it's always nice if they know to say "thank you" in Russian because it excites the hosts so much."
   This night, Soloveva also is giving them a lesson in Russian cuisine, preparing a "French style" pork dish and a crab salad.
   "I've enjoyed my year here. It's been a wonderful experience," Soloveva said, laughing as the tears flowed from slicing onions.
   Soloveva's experience in the cultural exchange program has taught her not to assume that people do things the same way everywhere and not to make value judgments about other cultures.
   "There's no better or worse way. It's just different," Soloveva said. "My advice would be to be open-minded, to try to learn as much as possible about the culture."
   Before dinner, Morrison, Ness, Hilton and Leis talked about their upcoming trip, all betraying an eagerness and the kind of open-minded attitude urged by Soloveva.
   Parts of the trip they're not looking forward to. They face a couple long flights - Minneapolis to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Moscow - to get there, with a total of 23 hours in the air.
   For leis, who will be taking his first airplane flight, the weeks without wheels could pose a problem. "I can't go 24 days without driving," he said.
   Morrison won't miss the highway as much as the information superhighway. " a month without online, that'll be interesting," she said.
   The students have gotten packing tips to help them condense three weeks of clothing into a couple suitcases. All said they'll include of loved ones, not only to help ease homesickness pangs but to show their new Russian friends.
   And they'll be bringing something that's not so easy to get in Dubna: ketchup. "I am going to bring ketchup and goldfish crackers," Morrison said.
   In addition to help from Soloveva, Morrison said she has talked to a past La Crosse exchange student, Sara Lecheler, and benefited from her experiences. Lecheler told Morrison to expect a life-changing experience.
   "Her perspective had changed in everything that she had taken for granted," Morrison said of Lecheler. "The life of a 17-year-old in America is 20 times different from the life of a 17-year-old in Russia."
   As the July 15 departure date creeps up, fund-raising and preparation for the trip still remains, including a car wash this month, postponed from a nasty weekend in April.
   The students and their families also have pun on a rummage sale and sold restaurant coupon books to help raise money for the exchange. "The families of the students work real hard," said Bill Trussoni, exchange coordinator, chaperone and fund-raising chairman.
   The La Crosse-Dubna Frienship Association exchange program not only helps pay for the La Crosse area students, Trussoni said, it also pays almost all the expenses for the Russian students to come here.
   Although most Russian families don't have a lot of advantages of families here, Trussoni said, the La Crosse area students don't have real hardships ahead of them. "the students will get treated like kings and queens," he said.