Maslenitsa: Pt. Deux

First off, I decided that I am going to go with some other people here to St. Petersburg for next weekend, so I should have some good stuff to talk about when I get back. Anyways, back to the butter week...

Today we went on another Maslenitsa-based excursion. This one was much bigger (like WAYYYYYY bigger), but it was also much, much less enjoyable. I won't have a whole ton to say about it, because we had to leave early...but ANYWAY...

I left a little bit later than everyone else did (except for Nathan, of course, who is always a good 15 minutes late). I left at about 1:10 (needed to get to Pushkinskaya by 2). I got there just on time, met up Lena, Jenson and Margaret (yeah, you don't know who they are - they're a couple more students at GRINT). We waited for about 12 minutes more for Nathan to show up and we left the metro.

Lena wasn't sure when the parade for Maslenitsa would be - as it turns out, it took place about 15-25 minutes before we left the metro...so when I got there. When we got to the street, there was a surprising amount of nothing. That doesn't sound interesting, but when Tverskaya (the main road in Moscow) is devoid of cars, that's something. What I could see, though, was a ton of small groups of people all making their way to the Red Square, all hungering for the fresh taste of free blini.

That was just a taste of what I was going to see, though. As we got closer to the entrance to Red Square, I could see an insane number of people trying to get to the blini. Mind you, this is just the entrance to the Red Square - the blini are on the OTHER SIDE of Red Square, near St. Basil's.

Yeah, that black stuff is people.

Me in front of a Maslenitsa doll, with my new hat.

We didn't really know where to go, so we just followed the river of people wherever they went: first down the street next to St. Basil's, then around a barricade back up the street, then around a corner, then around another corner, then around one more corner, back to the end of that street we came down the first time to a barricade of metal detectors. We went through and found an absurd number of people (probably around 4000 or so) crowding around tents, kiosks, and a stage. Speaking of the stage, there was a cool band playing that looked like they were out of the czar-era:

People were trying to get blini from any tent they could get to. In fact, Nathan went as soon as we got there to get some blini, and actually was the victim of some discrimination. Apparently, he got on line and worked his way to the front relatively quickly, but the lady serving heard him talking to an English woman while he was on line and when he came up to order, she would look at him with a glare and then move on the the person behind him. He said that he was ready to leave after she did this a few times, but a couple of Russians held him and yelled at the lady to serve him (seriously, I don't know what this crap about Russians being mean is - I've had nothing but good experiences with the average Russian; they just look mean). And so he wound up getting his $6 ham and cheese blini and a story to tell everyone back home.

Poor Nathan (right in the middle of the picture - black coat and black hat with gray fur) - he never knew what hit him.

At that point, (George) Jenson and I had seen pretty much everything, so we were ready to get on out of there. So we did. But we learned that Russians get REALLY REALLY excited about Maslenitsa and free pancakes.



Some other nice little images from the festival:

Russian kids are so adorable all bundled up. This kid was swinging his maslenitsa balloon around for a good 3 or 4 minutes.

POLAR BEAR DRUMMER!!!

Free soup. Jenson and I gave up pretty early - they really wanted some soup.

And finally, a cute Russian girl (who actually isn't looking at me despite the way the picture looks) taking a picture with the most Russian of characters - Piglet and the big blue guy from Monsters inc.