Last weekend, a festive craze swept Irkutsk into a mid-winter’s frenzy that would have been hard to produce any other way. Skies beautiful and clear, the winds calm, and the temperatures nothing too extraordinary at this point, there was plenty to be happy about, the first of which might very well have been the fact [...]
Posts Tagged ‘holiday’
Holiday: Maslenitsa, for one
Posted: February 20, 2010 in Иркутск, Holidays & Tradition, Out of TownTags: bliny, Buryatia, cold, games, holiday, Maslenitsa, New Years, Orthodoxy, paganism, skiing, spring, St. Valentine's Day, tradition, winter
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Moscow: Dictators, authors & theatre critics (Jan 5-7)
Posted: January 17, 2010 in Russia, Winter TravelTags: big bell, big cannon, Bulgakov, departure, fooling the Kremlin, Gogol, holiday, house museum, Inspector General, Kremlin, Lenin, Moscow, museum, Novodevichy Cemetery, Russian Christmas, theatre, Tolstoy, waxy figures, WiFi
Jan 5. State power day. Woo! Filled with a late breakfast (usually the broiled potatoes Ryan had made, long-overdue Honey Nut Cheerios with milk and OJ–simple delights I hadn’t had in months), I arrived at Kremlin walls just after 12 noon, where the line to see Lenin’s Mausoleum (free) was being told that they probably [...]
Holiday: Christmas and Y2K+10
Posted: January 9, 2010 in Иркутск, Holidays & Tradition, Winter TravelTags: 5 minutes, Christmas, cold, friends, holiday, impromptu decorations, Kazanskaya station, Midnight mass, Moscow, New Years, Red Square, The London Pub, tradition, Trans-Siberian, WiFi
Wrapping up the end of a semester, year, and decade in Russia came with a few idiosyncrasies, challenges, and definite high points. Hardest of all was being away from family and friends in the comfort of my grandparents’ living rooms, wishing that my Christmas and New Year’s could be white. But, the trade-off turned out [...]
Happy Day of the Revolution!
Posted: November 7, 2009 in Иркутск, Holidays & TraditionTags: Audrey Hepburn, holiday, Revolution
As we learned on Tuesday, the day before Wed., November 4, the National Day of Agreement? Peace?, no one really knows what the November 4 holiday is for. People just know that it was created since the fall of the USSR to replace the other, communist-celabratory holiday, today, November 7, the Day of the Great [...]
