Spring In Moscow

Spring arrived early this year to Moscow. It was a sunny 65 degrees in the middle of April and the good weather has more or less continued. With the birds chirping (something I didn't realize I missed), I decided to head outside and explore parts of Moscow that had previously kept me away.

This is one of the churches at Kolomenskaya park, it is a Unesco Heritage site.

There were some big holidays recently as well. One of them was Easter. During the Soviet Union going to church was restricted and even monitored by the KGB. One of my students related to me the fact that if you wanted to be a prominent figure in your work and were caught going into a church, your career would hit the glass ceiling suddenly. But things have changed now. They have changed so much that the former head of the KGB, Vladimir Putin, went to mass for Easter. The same student told me he almost laughed out loud when he saw Putin standing next to the Patriarch because 20 year previously he would have been sent packing from his post for such a thing.

This is my friend Artyom. He took me out for a ride in a boat even though I thought I would fall in.

Arytom also took me to Moscow State University, where there is a lovely park for walking.

With the church up and swinging again the Russians have brought back some old traditions. One of them is having your decorated Easter eggs and Easter cakes blessed. So hundreds of people lined up the evening before Easter Sunday and waited to have their eggs blessed. Since I was raised a protestant, the whole idea of mass and blessing were a bit beyond me. Usually in a protestant church there is enough room for all the congregation at one time but the orthodox churches are small, so people wait their turn to come in and kiss icons, light candles, get blessed, and cross themselves. I never realized how much the religions diverged.

The crowded church at Kolomenskaya.

Also, when it is warm, you can't keep a good Russian inside. They all drive out to their dachas, which should take an hour or so but because EVERYONE is driving out to their dacha, it takes about 4 hours (no kidding). Once they are there, they enjoy the fresh air and the freedom to barbecue (the national past time of Russians, they love it). So what is a dacha? They often translate it as a country home but that isn't very descriptive. It is just a house outside of the city. The house can be as simple as having no running water or electricity or as sophisticated as a normal house in American suburbia. Often the little houses are squished together, where your neighbor is 10 feet away. But no matter the kind they have, Russians relish and cherish the ability to leave the city for a few days.


On May 1st the Russians celebrated "Workers Day". During the Soviet Union this was a huge holiday and everyone was "encouraged" to march through the streets holding banners that said, "World, Peace, and Labor." This holiday originated in the US but when the Soviets took it up as well, the Americans changed their appreciated for the workers to Labor Day. Today the holiday was celebrated with about 20,000 people march through the street in support of communism. Todd and I followed the march for a ways. It was quite somber. This might be due to the fact that most of the people marching were elderly, which means the members drop dramatically each year.

Some demonstrators.

I thought the line of police looked cool.

Finally, Russia celebrated their biggest holiday of the year, Victory Day, on May 9th. This is the day that Nazi Germany finally surrendered to the Allied forces in World War II. Since Russia lost as many as 20 million people in the war, Stalin made it a huge holiday and propaganda tool. I was discussing with a British girl how both our countries never bother to remember VE-Day or even VJ-Day. So Todd and I watched the military parade through Red Square on television because the event was only for VIPs or else we would have gone in person to watch. Then we headed to Gorky Park to check out the veterans. Usually the veterans receive flowers from children as sign of respect for their efforts during the war. I was surprised to realize that a lot of the veterans are women. They were employed as snipers, pilots, and of course nurses and doctors. It was funny to see them walking around with their chests covered in metals too!

Great Citizens!

One of the veterans.

Look! The fountains have been turned on!

The America ride.

Todd heard one of his favorite songs being played while scantily clad economic students danced. Moscow is truely a great city. (Give it a moment to play through and can you tell which song it is?)

Hopefully, as spring turns into summer, there will be more interesting things to talk about from sunny Moscow!

My friends took me to the park. Zhenya, Elena, Artyom, and Olga.

My trip to Misr (aka Egypt)

Todd and I have just returned from Egypt and it was an interesting trip. We both had a good time but when we arrived back in Moscow, we felt a sudden sense of relief.

We departed from Moscow on the 22nd of March. When we arrived we were dumped in the most jumbled, chaotic airport I have ever seen. We quickly bought out visa and stood in line to go through passport control. Then we got our bags. All of this took 15 minutes. If you know something about airports, this is incredibly quick. So it may have been crazy but it was fast! The hostel we booked gave us a free pick-up at the airport, so we were happy to see Todd's name in big green letters waiting for us. The boy (he was 19) who drove us to the hostel was very nice but didn't speak a work of English. I didn't know then how much I would appreciate that later!

We stayed for two nights in Cairo. Our first night we only ate some Egyptian food and then went to bed. On the second day we booked a tour of Giza, to see the pyramids. We had a driver and a guide who spoke reasonably good English. Part of the tour we paid for also allowed us to visit a perfume shop (probably our guide's cousin), then we visited a papyrus shop (probably the driver's family shop), then we visited a carpet factory (probably someone else's relative). But we did get to see the pyramids, the sphinx, and saqqura.

Then on the next day, we took a four hour bus ride to the oasis town of Bahariyya. We had some problems when we first got on the bus because the man who checked our tickets said, "No bus." We took this to mean that we were on the wrong bus and we were naturally distraught. But the man didn't stop the bus to let us off and we just continued on our course. We were a bit stressed because we didn't know where we would end up. But in the end we arrived at our destination. We figure that "no bus" actually means, "wrong seat" because we couldn't read our bus tickets and just sat where we wanted. Ooops!

Then in Bahariyya, we were rushed by eight Egyptian men as we stepped off the bus. They all wanted us to stay at their hotel and take a tour. We were prepared for this so we shouted "no" at them and pushed our way through. Eventually we found the man from out hotel and he took us there. We stayed one night at the hotel and then the second night we camped in the white desert. So perhaps 200,000 years ago, there used to be a lake where the Sahara desert now stands and it has left a lot of interesting rock formations, sometimes you can find a sea shell or two!

Camping in the desert was the best thing we did on the trip. We were driven out into the desert and our guide, a Bedouin man, took us off the beaten track and showed us some cool stuff. Then in the evening we camped and he cooked us dinner and set up the camp. I desperately tried to help him but he refused and insisted I sit down or explore the rocks. Todd of course didn't mind this at all and put himself on "run patrol" which is Todd-enese for "not helping"! Also because we are Americans we had to have an armed tourist policeman with us, so he basically just sat around and our driver made him help! We got to see the sun set and the moon rise. It was awesome. Then during the night some desert foxes visited us. I was sleeping and didn't see them but they left their tracks in the sand.

After the desert we head to Luxor, which I nicknamed Butt-xor. The Egyptian ruins in Luxor were the best we had seen but the harassment from the taxi drivers and the merchants was unbelieveable. I felt like a walking dollar bill. No one was genuinely nice to us, they all wanted to do was trick us. It is a bad feeling to carry around with you. I expected men to stay stuff like this: "Heh, heh. Look at this! Yes! Combination hookah and coffee maker, also makes Julienne fries. Will not break!" But instead they said stuff to me like this: "Why don't buy this? Why you do this to me? I give you 50% discount. You lucky man (to Todd)." It drove me crazy! If someone tells Todd he is a lucky man one more time I will explode. And talk to him, he is not a lucky man, I beat him and torture him all the time!! :)

As for the sights in Luxor, we saw Luxor temple, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the valley of the Queens and the temple of Hatshepsut (the strongest and most famous female pharaoh). Karnak was by far the most amazing. It was a temple to the god Amunra and it used to employ 80,000 people. Most of the good stuff has been moved to the Egyptian museum but what was left was still amazing. Also, the Valley of the Kings was cool because we got to go down in actual tombs. The paint was still colorful on the walls, amazing after so much time.

Then after having all our fill of Butt-xor, er.. I mean Luxor. We hopped on the train back to Cairo. With our last two days in Egypt. We went to the Egyptian Museum and Islamic Cairo. The Egyptian Museum was cool but it was in absolute disarray. I expect a museum to be labeled, catalogued, organized, and somewhat sterile. Here, they had stuff laying everywhere. It said not the touch but you could do whatever you wanted. Plus, there were huge tours going on and it wasn't quiet at all.

Islamic Cairo was very interesting. We were taken on tour of the oldest and most famous mosque Al-Azhar. It claims to be the oldest educational institution, starting in 988AD. We were shown around by a nice man who wanted to take our picture in front of everything but wasn't very good at taking pictures! Hilarious. Anyway, he also instructed me that I should have 7 babies and told Todd if I couldn't have babies, then he should get another wife!!!

Overall, Egypt was fun. I wasn't prepared for the harassment that I was bound to receive but we got used to it after a few days. It just so happens that Todd and I are really nice, so we expect the best from people. If you go, don't take that expectation and you will have a great time. And the best news of all, Todd didn't trade me for a camel, although tempting, and I made it back to Moscow!

A Late Christmas and New Year Blog

I know that Christmas and New Year are the furthest thing from your thoughts in February. Usually we are counting down the days till spring but I figured that learning a little bit of Russian culture as you sit at work (because I know this is where all of you read this!) might be interesting. And hey, at least I got this blog posted before winter was over.

A Russian Orthodox Church inside the Kremlin.

So to help you understand a bit about the Russian holidays I have to tell you some history first. As you know Russia is a Christian nation, specifically Russian Orthodox, which means their church closely resembles the other Orthodox churches. There are many similarities between them but time has made them all grow quite distinct from one another. One point of pride for the Russian orthodox church is that their church is much the same as it was 1000 years ago and keeping with that tradition, they also use the Julian calendar. This was a reform by Julius Ceasar over the old Roman calendar and it is something the Russian Orthodox still continues using (though revised slightly in the 1920s). The rest of the world uses the Gregorian calendar which was a revision of the Julian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

So, as you can see, there are some problems with dates. When people in America are celebrating Christmas on the 25th of December (according to the Gregorian calendar), people in Russia have to wait until January 7th for their Christmas celebrations.


But the history of Christmas in Russia does not end with the Orthodox church. There was another event that forever changed the holidays, the Russian Revolution in 1917. The official state policy reguarding religion during the Soviet Union was that there would be a strict seperation of church and state. This was a huge blow to the orthodox church because they had been a priviledged and dependent part of Tsarist Russia. The USSR later declared that they were atheists and forbade most religious ceremonies or holidays. The leaders of Russia found themselves in a partiularly interesting position when the holidays came around. While you can change laws with the ink of a pen, it is harder to change what people had been doing for centuries. So they came to a compromise. The leaders deemed that New Year was not a religious holiday and could therefore be celebrated. This made New Year the biggest holiday in Russia. On New Year, families gathered together, presents were exchanged, New Year's trees were put up (actually an introduction by Peter the Great), and the minutes to the next year were counted down.

A Russian Orthodox Priest

Now in the 21st century, the Russian Orthodox church has revived and returned to it's previous, although slightly tarnished, stature and religious practices have been reinstated. But once again we have found that you can change the laws but the hearts and minds of the people are harder to sway. If you experience the holidays in Russia today, you can see that Dec. 31st/Jan. 1st is still more popular than Jan. 7th. I was curious of course and asked many of my students to explain their feelings about the holidays and many of them thought it ridiculous to celebrate Christmas after New Year. They felt that the orthodox church should reform their calendar. I know that the two students that said this are by no means an accurate cross section of Russia but it is an interesting point.

Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden

But now the good stuff. America believes that there is a jolly, old, fat man, clad in a red jumpsuit, that flies all around the world in one night and delivers presents to children. Russia is not without their own myth (hopefully kids under 10 don't read this, if so, that last word was a typo). They have a old, thin, blue clad man that travels around Russia and gives presents to children. His name is Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz). And can you guess which day he gives presents on? New Year? Yep, that's right!! But he is not alone in his cause to bring joy to children at New Year, he has help. He can be found roaming the streets with his granddaughter, Snow Maiden, (Snegurochka). They usually deliever their presents in person and you can hire people to come to your house and pretend for your kids.

So, as it turns out, we get to celebrate two Christmases in Russia!! Yeah, two calendars.

P.S. All these facts were either borrowed from Todd or from wikipedia. If I got something wrong, let me know. :)

Knitting with Svetlana

My friend Svetlana is teaching me how to make a hat. She taught me a new way to cast on and to knit. This video is long and might not be interesting but have a look! Enjoy!

Greece

Greece! Todd and I agree that this New Year was probably the best that we have had in a long time. Todd and I spent our first New Year together 4 years ago in his home town. We met friends of his in nearby Pittsburgh but ended up in the car when the clock hit midnight. On another occasion we went to a small night club with one of my Japanese friends where Todd got propositioned by a pimp to dance with some Japanese girls. We just don't seem to be the people who have crazy fun New Year celebrations. So we tried something different this year, travel.

We left Moscow on the 30th of December and after only a 3 hour flight found ourselves in Athens, Greece. The temperature was much warmer (at about 10 degrees Celsius) than Moscow and as we sat on the station platform waiting to be taken to the city, we marveled at how great the sunny skies and breeze felt. We were excited.

Our first stop was Larissa Station where we would find our hotel, Neos Olympos. The funny thing about Greece, at least in Athens, is that everyone speaks English! So unlike Moscow, where you usually get greeted with a frown if you must resort to English, Greek people smile and speak to you in English. I must say it was a welcomed change. I am so lucky that my language became the international one! At our hotel it was funny to hear everyone, from Chinese people to German people all speaking English. One of our hotel managers complimented my English and asked if I were German. I laughed and said I was American and he said, "well that explains it."

Our hotel room at Neo Olypmpos.

Next we set out to see the sights. We, of course, headed straight for the metro. Since the Olympic games were held in Athens in 2004, everything was shiny and efficient. The metro is quite small compared with what we are used to. We had to wait quite a bit, only to find out that Athens was much smaller than we expected. We could have walked many places! The best stuff to see in the city is centrally located, so we had no problems wandering around on the first day without a travel book or guide and bumping into ruins at every turn. The atmosphere was really relaxed and because it was off season, we didn't feel rushed or harassed as usual in touristy areas.

So for the next four days we went around seeing the sights and eating as many gyros as was humanly possible (so delicious! hmmmm!). It seems that they were prepared for us because we bought a ticket for five of the most famous things in Athens and then easily went on our way. We saw the acropolis, which is a huge rock in the middle of the city, where the ancient Greeks built temples to the gods. The most impressive structure is the Parthenon, built for the goddess Athena. The view from the top was really impressive, you could see the whole city. Then we wondered through the ruins and down the hill to the Temples of Hephaestus, the god of metal working. We also went to the National Archaeological Museum and saw some cool stuff. The best part of the museum was actually before we entered it. I was eating a muffin and when I threw the scraps to the pigeons I got chased and almost mauled by them. So hilarious, I did it twice! Then we visited the ancient cemetery called Keramikos and the temple of Zeus.

Todd indulging in yet another delicious gyro!

A view of Athens as we climb to the acropolis

The temple of Hephaestus in the background.

The temple of Zeus in the middle of Athens.

One of the things Todd wanted to see the most was the temple to Poseidon built at Cape Sounion. So we took a two hour bus to the temple. It was totally worth it. We got to wonder down the coast and see the Aegean Sea. It was really beautiful.

The temple of Poseidon.

Then for one night we went to the town of Delphi. It was in the mountains, quite a change from the city. Delphi was where the oracle of Apollo sat and told politicians or generals prophecies. It is believed that she gave her predictions while drugged by the natural gases in the mountain. When the Romans took over managing Athens, the city fell into disrepair because no one needed to ask the oracle anything. The Romans took a lot of things back to Rome but when it was excavated in the 1800s, there was still a lot of stuff left. The view from the mountains was breath taking and the small town was super cute. The only complaint we had was our hotel. we paid twice as much as in Athens but it wasn't as nice. Also, a word of warning. There are some goats and sheep that you will want to get a closer look at, just use caution. The cactus grass is deadly. Todd and I were playing on the side of this mountain and I fell, something the oracle probably would have predicted, and I got cactus spikes stuff all over me! Ouch!

The mountains at Delphi.

Goats on the mountains of Delphi.

Todd at Delphi.

Finally Todd and returned to Athens and spent and a day and half just chilling. I made a trip to H&M which was lovely and we bought the necessary souvenirs.

It was a nice break from work, Moscow, and routine.