Happy Maslenitsa!

Ah, spring. The time when a young man's fancy turns to ... What? What's that you say? It doesn't look like spring? Why, surely you jest. Look in the distance - you can see THE SUN!! We haven't seen it for months, and there it was last week, shining on the snowy park! Spring must have sprung!

So, what have we been up to whilst enjoying all this fine weather? Glad you asked! We'll get to the celebration of Maslenitsa in a bit, but first I should tell you about my trip last week to a local university. One of our friends, Vanya, studies there, and so I took a day off classes to head over to school with him. Fortunately, we attended his English class, where I was the impromptu featured speaker.

The below photo is of me and the professor, who was happy to have a real English speaker in the class for students to query. At first I thought they were an extremely inquisitive lot, wanting to know all kinds of things about me and what I thought about things, but I soon realized they were just trying to postpone the quiz the teacher had promised after I was through!

But now, on to the main theme of our post today: Maslenitsa. Maslenitsa, as you can see from this Wikipedia link, is the Russian equivalent of what we celebrated in Bolivia as Carnaval. The dates are a little off, since the liturgical calendars of Eastern and Western churches differ, but the idea is the same. A fast is about to start, so it's your last chance to party, and in the case here in Russia, eat!

Of course, there are a lot of holdovers from the previous pagan celebration of the arrival of spring, so when you mix all that together, you get Maslenitsa (Ма́сленица). What it means in this day and age is complicated, since the celebration of church holidays was forbidden for 70 years in the Soviet era, so a lot of it seems to be made up on the fly (or old stories from someone's babushka about what this meant or what they did at this time).

The important elements are blini, the Russian crepe/pancake, which is thought to represent the sun, and Kostroma, represented in straw effigy seen below. At the end of the week, Kostroma is burned, though no one seems to know precisely why (has something to do with purifying in some way, but exactly what is being purified is a mystery as far as I can tell). Of course, this particular Kostroma in the photo is "symbolically" burned, whatever that means, since you can't set fires right next to the Kremlin. ;)

All of these photos are from trips down to Red Square to see the celebrations in full swing there at a sort of Maslenitsa fair they've got set up. You can buy blini (see below video for the making of a yummy fish blini - remind you of anything, Aunt Marty?), ...

... get yourself a nice shashlik or sausage with bread ...

... or watch some traditional dances on the stage. I found these to be fascinating, and though I managed to miss the part where they did the squat-and-leg-thrust dance that was made so famous by Bugs Bunny, I did get a good bit of some of the traditional dances. Here's one for your enjoyment - the Russian answer to "Newsies," if you will.

Oddly, though we've been down to Red Square on several occasions, we'd never been at night, so we took the chance to wander around and see what it looks like. St. Basil's in particular looks really nice lit up, although it had rained (see? Rain! I told you spring was here!) earlier and thus washed all the snow off:

The whole square actually looks pretty sharp. This is the Historical Museum, with a skating rink set up in front of it. You can actually skate right there on Red Square, which might have been fun had one of us not been pregnant and the other a person who despises the art of ice skating (well, not actually the art itself so much as the resulting ankle pain, but you get the idea).

Of course, we've managed to do more than just celebrate Maslenitsa since we last posted. We also managed to weasel out of a day of classes to have our teacher come over for a "culture event," in which she showed Bobbie and our friend Julie how to make borshch and blini. Here J enjoys the fruit of all that labor, with a nice hot bowl of borshch with a dollop of smetana (sour cream), and a lavash (a sort of round bread).

This is B celebrating her first successful blin. The video we showed you above makes it look easy, but you have to remember they have a nice flat griddle designed for blini production. It's much more difficult to flip them without destroying them in a frying pan until you understand the trick, so it's worth the celebration.

Oh, and before I forget, I need to make the following announcement: the Wandering Family will be returning to the US for the birth of baby Nicole! We had hoped that things would work out so that we would be able to be here for her birth, but it doesn't seem that we will have time to get all the documentation that would be necessary arranged between the time when she's due and our visas expire. Short version is that we're planning to fly back to NC at the end of March, and return here at the beginning of July, which should give us enough time to get all the visas arranged post-birth for our return. If you're in North Carolina (or within reasonable driving distance) and would like to arrange for us to come visit you, we'd love to, so just email us and if possible we'll get together.

For the rest of our friends scattered around the country, I'm sorry but it doesn't look like we'll have time to see you this trip. We'll be sure to make the effort to do some more travelling next time, but 8 months pregnant is not the time to schedule an extensive road trip!

Last but not least, of course, we have numerous grandparents, other relatives, and various and sundry "leeches-who-only-care-about-our-son" who also read this blog, so if you're one of those, this obligatory cute picture of Steven is just for you. :)