The Crazy End to the Month of February!

 

February 23^rd, 2012

Souvenir Market

We had a day off today!!  Got to love these days! Well today we went to the Souvenir Market! It looks like a mini Disneyland, no joke! It’s so great! It’s so big and so many vendors with lots of fun things! It’s so hard not to want to buy just about everything!! However, some of the vendors, male to be more specific, can be really annoying and pushy! I was just walking by this guy who was selling these huge fur hats and he totally just started talking it up with us, asking us where we were from saying, oh I love American girls and started putting these hats on our head! Next thing I know he’s picking me up, twirling me around and kissing my cheek! It was so funny, I was laughing so hard, but so disgusting at the same time!  Thankfully we had our friend Jake, with us who served his mission in Ukraine and knows Russian, ther to save me and help get me away from him!! It was quite the experience! The rest of the day was really great though! We ate lunch at this little café, that was a little sketchy with the wild cats just walking around are feet while we ate! Then we went outside and took all of these great picks and just had a ton of fun in the snow! I also used my great bargaining skills to buy a matrushka doll that is so beautiful, and some Russian fairytale books! It was a great day!

Doesn't it look like a Russian Disneyland?!

Creepy Russian Salesman!

My very own Russian Matrushka Doll!!!!

Victory Park

Me and Ruani weren’t feeling very great by this time of the day, so we only got to see a little bit of this park before we went home, but at the entrance they have this wonderfully huge blow up of a Matrushka doll! It was so funny! However, from what I hear the rest of the park is amazing as it is a dedication to the Russian veterans of World War 11 and the victoms as more people died in Russia then anywhere else as Lenin and Stalin (but mostly Stalin) killed 20 million!!
P.S These Russian woman are crazy!!! Check out the shoes on this lady at Victory Park!

February - 24^th 2012

Maslenitsa: The Arrival of Spring Celebration 

Equivalent to our groundhogs days, every year, 7 weeks before the Russian Orthodox Easter, one of the biggest celebrations happens called Maslenitsa. It suppose to celebrate the arrival of Spring, but if you ask me, it’s about two months premature!!! There is still tons of snow on the ground, it’s freezing and it doesn’t start actually warming up enough for the snow to melt and flowers to start popping out of the ground till mid April!! Nonetheless, it’s a great party!!! Everyone dresses up in these great traditional cloths and it’s tradition to make pancakes that symbolize the sun and eat yummy food, dance, and best of all…burn a woman scarecrow to symbolize saying goodbye to winter and hello spring!! In the past they use to actually sacrifice a real person, but now they just stick to the scarecrow, which in my opinion is a lot better!!

 
 


February 25^th, 2012

Armory:

The Armory is located on Red Square inside the Kremlin and is massive! It is where they keep all the historic artifacts and belongings of the czars and czarinas. I have never been in a place that was worth so much money! It’s basically all I could think of the whole time! Everything was either made of Pure gold, covered in rare jewels, the finest wood, the most detailed craftsmanship, I mean, the list goes on and on! It still blows my mind thinking of it! It was really cool to see everything though! They had rooms for the different for carriages, dinner settings, outfits, historical church and old Egyptian artifacts and belongings of each of the different czars! It went on forever. Honestly by the end I was ready to leave. There was so much, it was a little overwhelming.

Cathedral of Christ:

This cathedral is beautiful and so big! Full of pictures of Saints and other special artifacts! What’s really cool about the cathedrals here though, that I’ve never seen anywhere else (that I can remember) is how they worship. Everyone has their saints picture that they pray to and after, they go up and kiss both sides of the picture. To me it seems a little weird, and I’m not going to lie all I can think of when I see it is, uh..so many germs! But it really is sign of devotion for them. Also, they where having a service when we were there so we got to listen to the choir sing which is always an amazing experience and one of my favorites!!

Lock Bridges

After we went to the Cathedral of Christ, we went to the lock bridges. When I first heard about the lock bridges, I was so excited to go!! The tradition is that when you get married, you and your new husband bring a lock and together lock it onto the bridge, or metal trees they have, symbolizing their union and that their hearts are now locked shut with the love they have for only each other!! How cute is that!!!! It’s such a cool place! There are thousands of locks of all different shapes, sizes, colors, etc. Some are newer and some are so old and rusty!!!! We even got to witness a couple lock their lock while we where there! There was confetti flying everywhere! It was so cute and so fun!

Old Lock Tree! So cool!

  February 26^th, 2012 

Hockey Game!!

 Well, today we went to a Russian hockey game!! It was Russia against Poland. It was a lot of fun, but i'm not going ot lie, after as a kid experienced the Flyers  who play dirty, along with their teammate, Daniel Brashear who in one punch managed to bust another dudes helmet an head, my expectations where higher than this game was boring in comparison. It was so clean! Just some baby shoves here and there and that was it! I could of pushed harder!! Nevertheless it was fun to experience an Russian hockey game!! 

February 27th

New School 

Well, Rauni and I opened up a new school!  However…it’s nothing like what you are probably thinking it would be like! It was nothing like what Rauni and I were thinking either! The first day we go, we get picked up by a driver, an employee of the school. Just as a quick side note, this was the first time we had been in a normal car since we left home and we were rather excited! Well twenty min. later we pulled up into a mall called Dream House in the most expansive shopping complex of the area complete with Prada, Loui Vuitton, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Giorgio Armani, Juicy Couture, etc. Upon arrival, we were completely confused, but were reassured that we were at the right place. As we walked through the mall, making our way to the third floor, we felt so out of place!! Everything was so nice and everyone so dressed up and here we are in the slacks and tops we brought that we didn’t really care for or care if got trashed from working with little kids! When we got to where we would be teaching though, that was thrown out the window as now all we could thing was what the heck, we teach in a mini children’s club!!. And let me specify here that when I use the word club, I am literally referring to it in the context of as a place adults go to party, dance, drink, and have a good time! Granted it was all children’s style, but it was a club complete with awesome toys, video games, funky mirrors, cool flooring that change colors and move around as you walk, nooks in the wall that you could climb around in…oh and did I mention there was music playing, strobe lights going along with a disco ball and oh of course I can’t forget the’ children’s  Bar??!!! Yup that’s right, they had children’s bar complete with an awesome sitting area for the kids to sit back, sip their drink, and oh I don’t know, maybe read one of the magazines provide such as Cosmopolitan or Vogue!! I was horrified beyond words! Well because we only ever had one student of three come, it was shut down after only four weeks. 

 

Other Fun events that took place in February :

What a busy month it was!!!!

Russian Circus: 

So much fun! If you ever have the chance GO, GO, GO!!!

Children’s Dance Festival: 

This was a fun experience, and I really liked seeing all the different costumes, they were pretty cool, but if you ever go, SIT SOMEWHERE YOU CAN LEAVE INCONSPICUOSLY WHEN YOU’VE HAD ENOUGH! This recital literally lasted three hours!!!! It was the longest thing of my life and we were sitting dead center up front so there was no chance of us walking out in the middle!