2010: A Russian Odyssey

Maslenitsa in Novgorod

Long time no blog! The past couple weeks I’ve either not had much to say or didn’t want to spend time typing away on my computer. But this weekend we didn’t have any planned excursions, and I’ve been staying inside most of the day (I’m all caught up with LOST now!!)

Last weekend we took a trip to the city of Novgorod, a 3.5 hour bus ride from St. Petersburg. Novgorod is considered a “more Russian” city than St. Petersburg, so it was nice to get a feel for what the true Russian lifestyle, history, and architecture is all about. The main sites in Novgorod are churches… there are A LOT of churches. Besides ornately painted icons covered in Old Church Slavonic, we saw some homes that served as examples of how Russians used to live in Novgorod.

Besides museums and churches, there wasn’t much else to do in Novgorod – the most interesting looking cafe required reservations so we couldn’t even go there! On our way back to St. Petersburg though, we stopped in the city center to visit the Maslenitsa festival. Maslenitsa is a week-long Russian holiday (“Butter Week” in English) whose history I won’t even attempt to recite, I’m sure Wikipedia has some information.

Basically what we gathered was that during Maslenitsa you eat a bunch of blini (which are like pancakes, but better) and on the last day they burn a figure that looks like a babushka. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but it was fun to be a part of it – walking from the city center to the beach and watching the figure burn. It was an actual cultural experience, which was a nice change from attempting to understand culture through museums.

The past week has been mostly routine, we’re all getting into the Peterburgian groove. Our next major trip will be to Moscow, and that’s coming up around March 25. Our spring break, or “Russian travel week,” starts on March 28 in Moscow and goes until April 4. A lot of people are busy planning their week, I think most are going for the warm choice of Istanbul for the week.

My friend Zoltan and I decided to go a more historical/cultural route and are planning on traveling the Baltic countries near St. Petersburg together. Warsaw (Poland), Vilnius (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and Tallinn (Estonia) are currently on the list, so we’ll see how well we can plan that out.