Женский День (Women's Day)

So, tomorrow, March 8, is Women's Day - the day, on which, every man in Moscow is obliged to bring flowers to basically every female he knows. It sounds like some wimpy Valentine's day thing, but trust me, it's a big deal. How do I know? I've already gotten chastised for forgetting.

Now, because Women's day is tomorrow and because it's a national holiday, that means that we won't be having our Russian class. This also means that our teachers will not be coming to campus tomorrow, and so we will not be able to give flowers to them. Therefore we were to celebrate Women's day at GRINT on Friday. The only problem? No one told us that that was what we were going to do (this is mostly because I thought we'd be having class on the actual day - guess I didn't learn from Men's day).

I went to class as usual, but unlike usual there were balloons all over the place. I was obviously confused, though I, being the smart guy that I am, managed to put два and два together and figure out that we were in fact celebrating our estrogen-laden compatriots today and not in three days. Whoops.

I walked in without flowers, which made Zoya shake her head in shame, calling me and (George) Jenson "плохие люди" (bad people). After being put to shame for forgetting (never knowing) that there would be such a celebration, Zoya gave Sharon a bar of chocolate, because it is Russian tradition that when the men don't congratulate and give gifts to the girls, that the older women should make up for the failure.

Class went fine for a while, and as usual we took our break about midway through the three hours. Jenson and I decided that we would take a little longer than usual and head towards the metro area where there are flower shops so that we could make up for our horrible, horrible mistake. This was one situation where having flower shops on almost every corner is incredibly useful (it's like Moscow knows that men will mess up constantly here and will need easy access to flowers).

Anyway, we found a kiosk and waited on line to buy our flowers. Maybe it's just because I've never really had cause to buy flowers in the past, but damn those things were expensive. I wound up buying some big yellow flower for Zoya and like, a daisy (?) for Sharon. (George) Jenson bought a red rose for Zoya (150 rubles - 5 bucks). Including the walk back we took about 35 minutes to accomplish our mission of redemption. Normal breaks are about 10 minutes, if that. So yeah, we were a little late in getting back, but that's OK! We had flowers.

We got back and gave them our gifts, to which Zoya replied that they had been talking about as while we were gone and had decided that we weren't quite as bad a pair of guys as she originally thought. How wonderful.

I'm a little more prepared for tomorrow, you know, THE ACTUAL WOMEN'S DAY. Russians take their holidays seriously.