before Moscow there was...

Meant to post this before I headed to Moscow...so we'll backtrack and I'll have new posts for you this week :-)

Happy day of the people! (Or something like that.) Well, actually that was yesterday, November 4^th. It’s a rather new holiday, instated a few years ago in place of the November 7^th holiday that everyone had gotten so used to in the Soviet Union. No one quite understands the new holiday though, it is a blend of an old Imperial holiday marking the importance of the Kazan icon and the remembrance of the Soviet holiday, some say. My host mom wasn’t sure what the holiday was, but she knew that it was a day off of work and therefore a great day to bake! So some friends came over this evening and we made pelmenni to celebrate the holiday!

This past weekend was a lot of fun, though it didn’t include very much sleep! Friday night we went midnight ice skating after starting the night at a sushi restaurant. The ice skating was tons of fun, though would have been better if the skates and ice were better. Friends make up for everything though, and it was very entertaining to observe that teenage boys in hockey skates behave pretty much the same regardless of what continent you’re on and what language they’re yelling at each other in. Brought back great memories of Cleveland Heights and Athens too, except that in Russia they don’t mind if you take tons of pictures on the ice and skate backwards around the outside!

Saturday was Halloween, and Tom and I decided it would be a great day to visit a cemetery! The Alexander Nevsky Monastery is quite famous here, the patriarch of St. Petersburg lives there and it also houses a theological school. Within its walls there is also a gorgeous Orthodox church and plenty of cemeteries to wander on what turned out to be a sunny, if cold, fall day. It was wonderful to crunch through the leaves and look at the differences between Russian and American cemeteries, and just enjoy wandering around until our hands and feet started to go numb after a few hours. The cemeteries were also particularly interesting because of the grave ornaments – many had portraits or photographs of the person buried there, and many others had the communist star or the hammer and the sickle. The majority were still probably marked with Orthodox crosses, but the hammer and sickle on one particularly tall headstone definitely reminded us that we were not in Kansas anymore.

That night Sarah came over to my apartment and we got ready to go to the Halloween party hosted by the university at one of the big clubs in town – with a stop at a student bar first for some beer and garlic bread. By the time we got to the club it was already packed, and Jarlath had us completely fooled by his mummy costume! 5 of us danced the night away as the Spice Girls which proved to be a fun and very comfortable costume decision, if not the most creative of all time. Random contests and dances – costumed and otherwise – on stage broke up the night, but we were more than content to just dance and sing all night. I caught about an hour of sleep Saturday night and woke up to get myself to church. I was incredibly glad that I made sure I got up, because I actually met an OU alum after church! I had my OU sweatshirt on and he introduced himself to me afterwards, asking if I was really a student from Athens or whether I had just bought the sweatshirt somewhere. Turns out he is a ’74 grad in chemistry! He was just a tourist, not here for a long period of time, but it was still pretty crazy. Every time you forget how small the world is, something happens to remind you!

This week went by especially quickly because not only did we have the enticement of Moscow and our vacation week, we also had school off on Wednesday for the holiday-that-no-one-quite-knew-what-it-was. Spent the day relaxing with the host mom and then some of my friends came over and we made pelmenni and they were all so overjoyed by my host mom and how warm and inviting our apartment is. I have only been to one other apartment, but through listening to people I only know of a couple situations that are like mine in that respect. It just makes me more glad that I have decided to stay for next semester! And now off to skype with Stef and tonight, the train to Moscow!