Weekend in Novgorod: Blini and churches!

Friday, 9:45 pm. Classes...they’re very classlike. Russian Civ currently has us examining our self-perceptions as Americans, while in Ethnic Studies we’re discussing the difficulties of balancing national identity and Soviet identity. I have to admit, though, that five people discussing ethnography on a Friday afternoon just makes for an anticlimactic end to the week. But, we’ve got Novgorod tomorrow to look forward to! :D

Friday night plans and waking up at 6:30 Saturday morning don’t mesh well, so Erica, Matt and I left classes together and found a café about halfway between Erica’s and my homestays and the metro. We spent a lovely two hours over tea and blini discussing literature, Russian philosophy, and what the lamps had been in a previous incarnation. (Tea kettles and old wash tubs, we finally decided.) When we’d about exhausted the topic of Lolita, I came home, had a lovely dinner, packed for Novgorod, and sat drinking tea with Lyudmila Afanasyevna and discussing why men can’t cook (sorry, Dad!). It’s looking like an early night, if I want to have any chance of staying awake for the tour tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll have an internet connection over the weekend, but I am taking my computer (for the 4-hour bus ride), so you’ll be treated to a narration of the weekend’s retreat. :D
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Saturday, 11:50 am. You know, it’s a shame you can’t take a decent picture out the window of a moving bus. The countryside between St. Petersburg and Veliki Novgorod (Novgorod the Great, as opposed to Nizhny—the not so great?—Novgorod) is almost mythically beautiful, all birch forests and pines. The trees themselves look kind of scrubby, at least compared to the giant forest of, I don’t know, Pavlovsk, but there’s still a certain pride to the forest that’s managed to survive this far north for this long. The interspersed villages are charming as well, with brightly painted houses against the snow. Four hours on the bus this morning wasn’t bad at all.

We actually made it into the hotel EARLY today. I wasn’t sure that was permitted in Russia, or at least within CIEE. We’re checking into lovely little rooms on the top floor and heading out to lunch and explorations in a bit. :)

Sunday, 7 pm. So, you know that account of the weekend I promised to write? It’s coming halfway through the ride home, about two hours from St. Petersburg. Fascinating retreat. Novgorod is beautiful, Maslenitsa’s a blast…and good grief, it’s hard to type in the dark. I’m low on battery here, so I’ll try not to ramble for too long.

Saturday and Sunday were mostly taken up with bus-and-walking tours of the city of Novgorod. We visited the Kremlin (the historical seat of government, from when Novgorod was an independent city-state), a bunch of famous churches (spent an hour and a half learning about every bloody icon in the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom), and a number of monuments and other picturesque sites. Our guide (for the Area Studies tour) was a lovely babushka named Natalya who gave us far more history than we ever would have learned from books, sprinkled with wonderful little gems of life advice. I wish she could come with us back to Petersburg and teach our history class! (Of course, she was also the reason we spent an hour and a half in the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom, which is really pretty small for an hour and a half. But, it was worth it.)

Saturday evening was spent watching the Olympics (skiing, speed skating, and snowboarding) with about twenty people packed into Brenna’s and my hotel room. (She’s now Brennuchka, by the way. We also have a Misha, a Matveychka, and an Erichka in the group, and we’re intending to give everybody a Russian nickname by the end of the tour. Not sure how you make Amanda into a nickname, though. We’ll see.) Sunday, after the first part of the tour, we were treated to a Maslenitsa feast in a local restaurant, and then we spent some free time exploring the Maslenitsa festival! As I understand, Maslenitsa is the name of the whole week leading up to Lent, but it’s also the name of the last day, which is taken up with a cross between a county fair and the Renaissance Festival. The feast was incredibly tasty, mostly salati and blini (I may or may not have had six) and live folk music in the background! Anya, Jarlath’s girlfriend/fiancée, taught a group of us how to dance to the folk music, and I have some very entertaining video of her and Jarlath. :D (Sadly, I STILL have two left feet.) At the festival, all around the Kremlin, on both sides, were set up vendors’ booths, a concert stage by the statue of Lenin, and games and other entertainment. I wandered for a bit with four of the girls and actually persuaded Liz to come dance with me to some traditional Russian folk music. :D I also bought a couple of little souvenirs, including a very cute hand-carved wooden barrette I’m wearing now.

Irrelevant, but still interesting: out of forty-five people on the program, it’s kind of fascinating how many of us have birthdays this semester. We’re in the middle of four birthdays in a row right now: Claire’s on Saturday, Hayley’s on Sunday, Nadya’s on Monday, Zoltan’s on Tuesday. Also, Jarlath (the American coordinator) and I figured out on Saturday that we share a birthday! The Sunday before our trip to Moscow, he turns thirty and I turn twenty, so we’ll plan something particularly interesting. As a group, we are NOT following the Russian custom of having the birthday celebrant pay for the entire event, though. For college students, that’s just not practical.

My computer seems to be genuinely angry at me for not finding a place to plug it in on the bus, so I’m going to end this account for now and continue back in the apartment/tomorrow. For now, once I get home, it’s tea and bedtime.

11:00 pm. In addition to being Maslenitsa, it’s Valentine’s Day, so Erica and I stopped by the local flower shop once we got off the bus. We each picked out a lovely bouquet of carnations for our host moms, and they were surprisingly inexpensive! Russians LOVE giving flowers, so I guess it pays to make the process economical. Lyudmila Afanasyevna exclaimed over the flowers and put them in a vase on the table, where they brighten up the kitchen very nicely indeed. She also fed me three blini with blackberries (frozen), bringing my total blini count for the day to thirteen. :D Now, it’s seriously bedtime if I have any hope of making it through class tomorrow. Happy Valentine’s Day/Maslenitsa/whatever you care to celebrate, everybody!