fatherland defenders' day

Happy (belated) February 23!

Here in Russia, Feb. 23 is Fatherland Defenders' Day (День защитника Отечества), which originally means something about the Russian Civil War, but it's come to be popularly known as more of just a "guys' day" (a counterpart to March 8, which is women's day). Let me just say, Russia really knows how to do holidays. None of the US "hmmm I think Monday is something...presidents' day? ah well, I don't get the day off anyhow" stuff.

As such, a few cool things happened.
1) no classes - now there's a concept, unlike at Mudd, when there's a national holiday a university gives its students the day off!
2) I was told that we (the women) were cooking dinner for the guys and wound up being in charge of a salad and dessert
3) there were fantastic fireworks at 9pm

Lack of classes meant no Politology at 10am. And since a typical morning consisting of getting up, talking on Skype, taking a shower, eating breakfast, and getting to class takes a good 2.5-3 hours, I was happy to sleep well past 7am.

Around noon, Jenna and Jessica came down to talk to Laura and me about the dinner we were going to prepare. (Apparently Celina and Nick had decided it was going to happen, and I figured what the heck, nothing else to do anyway and I'm pro-food!) I was a little vague on what all the main courses entailed, but everyone was talking about tons and tons of pasta and sauce and meatballs and chicken, so I figured I'd do a salad. If I was in the US I'd whip up some killer guac...but no can do here. Next best thing - a salad containing avocado, little mozzarella cheese balls, tomato, and red onion. And of course lettuce, and some kind of dressing called "dressing salad sauce" (translated straight from the bottle).

So off we went to Рамстор, the big grocery store only a few bus stops away. Thing is, an excursion to Рамстор (that's ramstore for you non cyrillic readers) always involves most of an afternoon, especially when it's busy. The lines are outrageous, and just getting to and from there is a bit of an adventure, not to mention finding things once inside.

We made out pretty well (except Jenna left her empty backpack in her cart and it got stolen...she had to re-find all the items in her cart and is now lacking a backpack). Got back around 4pm or so, and soon realized no one had procured dessert, so that task was given to me since all I had to do was chop stuff up. They originally wanted dinner to be at 6, which got pushed to 7, and then 7:30, and wound up actually being a bit after 8. It's the Russian Way.

Anyway, it was a fabulous meal!! Everyone loved my salad, we had WAY too much pasta but it was all good, Jessica made those tomato with mozzarella cheese things I love so much, and Советское Шампанское started flowing. (That's Soviet Champagne.) It was great to eat a "normal" home cooked meal. Then right around 9 as everyone was finishing eating and I was about to serve dessert, fireworks started going off everywhere! (Dessert was some kind of chocolate covered cake with foamy cakelike batter and swirls of something resembling cool whip inside, and vanilla ice cream on the side.) Everyone opened up the windows - WIDE - and the temperature promptly dropped to below freezing indoors. But no one cared, because as Jeff put it "we're at the epicenter of a ring of fireworks!!" The view from the 17th floor was phenomenal. Then everyone ate dessert - the ice cream was exquisite - and vodka appeared along with a few silly rounds of "Indian Poker" and around 1 or 2am everyone dispersed.

I managed to meet some people last night, though - a guy and a girl from Oregon (small world!), a guy from Iran, and a girl from France who's been living in Latvia recently. She was awesome, one of those eccentric travel the world and live out of a suitcase and speak 8 languages kind of people.

Now it is Saturday, and today is laundry day for me. I'm actually washing my sheets right now, so I'm hoping they'll be able to dry by the time I want to go to bed tonight. I talked with Katie from Mudd briefly yesterday, and she's going to call and see if anyone from my group wants to join her and some from her group as they're led around to some bars and/or clubs by a couple of Russian girls they met. (I think that's the plan, anyway.) So, that should be an adventure, if it happens.

I think that's a good motto for me. "That will be an adventure, if it happens."