С Новым Годом! (The holiday season in Russia)

I got the great opportunity to return to the States for 2 weeks for Christmas so I'm not currently in Russia, but since I have some time, I figured I should backtrack and fill you all in on Russian Christmas, or rather, on Russian New Year, which is kind of the same thing, but not quite.

So because of the Orthodox calendar, among other things, December 25th is not a holiday for the majority of Russians. You're probably asking: How do the Russians make it through the long winter without a cheery holiday strategically placed right near the darkest day of the year? What what about the Christmas tree? Santa? Presents? Got 'em all. It seems that some Tsar some time ago decided that rather than celebrating 2 holidays back-to-back at the end of December, some consolidation was in order. So Santa, presents, even chopping down a tree and planting it INside your house shifted down a week and now somehow resides with midnight countdown and champagne glass clinking. Which is to say: New Year's Eve has everything. Interestingly, while some traditions span the culture, there are a few variations in the realization of them. My teenage students asked me incredulously why we would possibly hang our socks on the wall by the fire, while I wondered how Santa entered the Soviet-style apartment blocks without chimneys. Having never really thought about it, my students replied that he just comes in through the door.

Anyways, December was a busy month (hence the scarcity of blog posts), but I enjoyed the increasing amount of lights decorating the city, and it's been great to see family and friends during my holiday in the States.

I asked my 10 year olds to "Make Christmas" with just some random school supplies. This is what they came up with.

A tree at Sokolniky park

Trees adorn the streets of Moscow.

Outside of Gorky Park

Festive lights along the street of Dolgoprudny

Street decorations in the city.

Friendsgiving-belated

Hi faithful followers,
My apologies that it's been over a month since my last entry! I guess nagging works, because I can only stand so many emails signed "blog entry?" "Where's the blog entry" "No blog entry in December?" instead of the traditional "Love, Dad". (Sorry, Dad).

Anyways, it's been a busy month, as December often is, but I have an hour before my flight home (!!!) boards, so I thought I'd catch you all up on the last month in the life of Molly in Moscow.

One of the things I anticipated being the hardest about living out of the US for a year is being away for the holidays. I'm lucky enough to be going back for Christmas, but it turns out the Russian calendar of Federal holidays doesn't really care when the Pilgrims broke bread with the Native Americans, so I worked on Thanksgiving. While my youngest students did make hand-turkeys and I got a chance to Skype with my family post-the big meal, that Thursday didn't really feel like Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, I wasn't the only ex-pat who was feeling unfestive. The search for a large turkey proved fruitless, and our options were some expensive "baby turkeys" or good old chickens. Since we were planning to feed a verifiable army (approximately 30 people), and most people either didn't know what they were missing or didn't care, we opted for the chickens. 6 of them.

The 6 chickens, before

Mid-prep, we needed 2 ovens to cook them all!

Cooked, maybe as good as turkey!

So we had close to 30 people at our "Friendsgiving". Many were Americans, craving the food and friendship of the holiday, but many were friends from abroad, mostly Italians and Russians, who were curious about Thanksgiving and wanted to share it. Because of its international nature, our Thanksgiving had a mix of traditional Thanksgiving food, cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc, but it also had some traditional Russian and Italian foods, including, herring under a fur blanket, salad olivier, and others.


Here's our table:

Of course, no Thanksgiving would be complete without the pie. We tried without success to find pumpkin, so pumpkin pie was sadly absent from our meal, but I did make an apple pie from scratch. No big deal.

All in all, it was a great day. While it was still hard to be away from family on this holiday that's mostly about family, getting to share this tradition with new friends, many of whom had their very first Thanksgivings, made it just a little bit easier.

Mid-November Updates

A couple of exciting things have happened recently that I neglected to mention in my last post:

1. Over the past year a lot has changed in my life and what with graduating from college, moving to Russia, etc. I've accomplished some pretty big stuff. Arguably the thing about which I'm most proud, however, is finishing this sweater! I started it in mid January, carried it across country borders, and now it's comfy and warm and just in time for a Moscow winter!

2. Speaking of the Moscow winter, it snowed this morning! It didn't stick, and by mid-afternoon it had turned to rain, but still! It was pretty, it made my day a little bit brighter (despite being cloudy), and gave me an excuse to start listening to Christmas music.

3. I had my first Russian lesson on Wednesday! It was a one-on-one lesson, and although I've been able to speak some Russian day-to-day, it was great to really get a chance to work on it and try to improve it. Also I realize that although I spend every day surrounded by language learning, I miss foreign languages. I'm planning to take a lesson every week, which should seriously help my language level.

4. In my class with 11 year olds today, the subject of Michael Jackson came up and resulted in my students moon-walking across the classroom. Also in this class, I've been telling these kids that I don't speak Russian so that they'll speak to me in English. Today they asked me (in Russian) if I understood Russian and I responded without thinking"no", but clearly I had understood because I could respond. They totally caught on. Oh well.

5. Some of the recipes I've been attempting have needed vanilla. So in a bizarre combination of my travels, I found a packaged vanilla bean from Madagascar at the grocery store. I split it and put it into Russian vodka, and it will soon be Russian-Malagasy vanilla extract. Weird how these things can come together. Truly a small world.

Anyways all for now!

Money, money

In my class tomorrow, we're talking about money, so I thought I'd bring in all the different types of currency I have with me: US dollars, Canadian dollars, euros, and of course roubles. I brought most of them to be prepared throughout my travels, not knowing where I'd be flying through the next time I was leaving. I'm struck by how plain American currency is.

Time flies when you get into a routine

I have no idea how this has happened, but it's come to my attention that it's been almost a month since my last blog entry. I'm quickly falling into a routine of teaching, lesson planning, and hanging out that, quite frankly, isn't very interesting. The teaching is far from easy, especially with the young kids (if anyone has any tips for taming 6 5-year olds who are crazy and don't speak the same language, I am all ears...) but still, it's crazy to think about how nervous I got during our training period before teaching for only 45 minutes to adults. Now, I almost daily teach for twice that long, with no stress.

There's been a few highlights of teaching, especially for Halloween last week. Although Halloween is not traditionally celebrated in Russia, we were encouraged to celebrate it, especially in our kids classes. We did crosswords, pictionary, and the 5-year olds even made masks and trick or treated to out recptionist! The best part was when she tried to give candy to them all and one boy said (in Russian) "my mom doesn't let me have candy" and refused to take it. 

Here's a picture of my classroom on Halloween:

Besides English, I've been learning other things too. For instance, have you ever heard of chess boxing? I hadn't. It is one round chess and one round boxing, alternating. Here's a page from one of my text books:

Finally, in most classes there are the teacher's pets. This can be amusing, however, when the kid's grasp on English is still fuzzy. Here's an example after our lesson today on past irregular verbs: 

So, either I'm dead or I'm now a bad teacher. Either way. At least he used the right verb. 

Hopefully it will not be another month before I post again, but my apologies if it is. I promise I'm still here, I've just found a routine.

Some time at the Kremlin

I feel like I should be spacing out some of these blog posts, I mean, 3...4 in one week? I'm out of control! But I just keep seeing some really cool stuff and wanting to share it. In all likelihood it will be snowy and cold within the next month and I'll spend all my time wrapped in a blanket hiding from the cold and not doing anything blog-worthy. For now, though, I'm taking advantage of this city and trying to see the most that I can from it.

It was my day off from work, but I had to go into the city early this morning for a training session for my job. The day did not start off great. It was still dark when I woke up this morning and on my way to the train the heel broke off my boots. The day definitely improved, though.

After the training, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant which was really good. Then, after I bought some new shoes, we went over to the Kremlin. I had seen it from the outside, but hadn't been inside yet. It was amazing! The fortress is so full of history, cathedrals, as well as government buildings with a lot of security around.

Here are the walls outside the Kremlin.

This guard stands outside of the Kremlin. They won't move, even if you stand right next to them...take pictures with them...

Canons from the arsenal.

HUGE canon, apparently it was never actually used, at least not with canonballs.

 

The inside of the Kremlin has several beautiful Cathedrals. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take picture inside, but the walls were full of crazy historical icons, as well as the tombs of some Tsars, including Ivan the Terrible!

 

View of the Moskva River from the Kremlin

Cathedral of Christ the Savior outside of the walls of the Kremlin.

The Russian flag flies over the land.

Statue of the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus' (the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church)

This statue was outside of the Kremlin

Only 119 days until Sochi!

The Crisp days of Fall

Apparently I have a lot to post this week. This morning after my lesson I went outside and it was such a beautiful day (around 54 degrees F, 13 C, and almost even sunny) that I couldn't resist going for a walk and exploring Dolgoprudny some more. This being my first Fall out of New England, I've been missing some of the best Fall things: foliage, pumpkins and that great Fall smell. While I haven't seen any pumpkins (maybe they only exist in the New World?) and the foliage here is kind of lame (the trees are changing, and leaves are falling, but without much sun, the colors are pretty drab) BUT I didn't manage to stumble across that Fall smell. I'm sure I seemed crazy inhaling deeply as I walked, but I didn't care. The smell of crisp Fall air is maybe my favorite part of the season, I managed to find it here.

I also found...

The Batmobile?

Some cool graffiti

A really awesome park with lots of small man-made ponds

And many playgrounds for kids, this is my favorite. Who wouldn't want to play in these brick castles?

A cool statue of a horse-drawn carriage

Another cool statue of a man reading a map.

This oh-so-stylish dog.

Another view of the park.

 Just North of the park, I found this Lake that I had seen on Google Maps and had been meaning to explore for a while. I absolutely love being near the water, and I would rather be near a lake than most other places. This particular lake has almost an amphitheater on its banks. I imagine that this place is much busier in the summer. I'm not sure if this platform is for things like plays, or maybe swimming off of, or both. I guess I'll have to come back in the summer to find out!