Tome 3: Victory Day and What That Means

So, to refresh your memory, the May holiday here is in two parts.  The first section begins with a holiday on May 1st, and then we have 5 days off.  The there are three work days and we get another long weekend, this one 4 days for victory day.  The first vacation I hopped over to Europe, but then soon enough I was back in little Pushchino ready to enjoy the next vacation with my friends here.  

In the few classes we had between breaks, I decided to put off grammar a little bit (if you had two classes in the middle of a long vacation how much would you remember?) and instead use our English (which by the way has been improving which makes teacher very happy) to have a little fun.  Above are some of my students celebrating the successful solution of a murder mystery.  Things I love about my students is that they are really creative and get really into things they are excited about.  I gave some of them their characters in advance which is why we have a man dressed in a kimono, and why our girl on safari made her own cobra in a box.  What I've always enjoyed about language classes, are that because language is a medium and not an end (in contrast to say, a social science course) you spend class just talking to people about different things and end up learning a lot more about them just as practice.

We are drinking birch wine.  Let me tell you a little bit about this drink since it seemed to be a recurring topic for each class period over more than a week's time.  Birch juice is a common drink in these parts.  Unlike maple syrup,  the birch sap is not boiled, it is simple drunk straight as you get it.  Tapping happens for about 3-4 days in the spring, carefully timed to when the buds are big but not quite burst.  Most people tap at heights reasonable for human beings.  But, R----, the producer of this drink, insisted that the best sap came from 7 meters up.  Checking for a language error, I probed...you mean point seven meters up?  Nope.  Turns out this spry older man likes to climb to the tip top of trees to get the choicest birch juice to then ferment with rose hips into a drink that (in my opinion) resembles vinegar a bit too strongly.  However before the fermentation process the drink is delicious and after much class discussion on the issue we decided he either knew what he was talking about, or was just looking for an excuse to act like a squirrel.  

Next up on the grand adventure list is Victory Day, including what I will refer to as my second adventure in something not happening (see "How I Didn't Get to Vladimir").  Victory Day is May 9th, the day that the Red Army marched victoriously into Berlin.  There is a huge parade in Moscow (just wait!) and the metro is half closed down and half flooded with people.  Everyone turns out for these things, so there were some pretty incredible crowds let me tell you!.  

So, if there was such a huge, big, impressive parade why do I have no pictures of tanks?  Well, because we er, sort of missed the parade.  It wasn't an issue of timing: we got up almost quite literally at the crack of dawn to catch the bus into the city.  We discussed possible vantage points, and agreed upon Tverskaya because people had had great views there in the previous years (for those of you wondering, Red Square is for important people only).  We were worried the metro would be closed off, but we managed to get out and even scrounge a perch on a lamp post (any other day we would have been chased off of it) for a view.  There was a half hour to spare before the parade was set to start.  Then the whispers started.  The tanks had already passed.  What?  Then why was there a crowd, the road cleared with police patrolling it clearly waiting for a parade?  Why did it look so parade ready if there wasn't going to be a parade?  But after 40 minutes there still was no parade, and finally one of the policemen decided to get on his megaphone and tell the hundreds of people waiting that the parade route had moved, there wasn't going to be a parade here.  We decided to move quickly to the Arbat to try to catch the tail end, which is when we did see the tail end of the parade flying noisily straight over our heads.  So we didn't really get to see the parade, but by all accounts the best view of it anyway is at home in your living room on the TV.  And that I can provide for you here.  I suggest you skip ahead to 40 minutes though, thats when the equipment starts!

This is what a Russian fire hydrant looks like.  Saves parking spots, but I'm not really sure what happens if they need to pipe under your car.

After we gave up on organized events we wandered towards some cooler quieter parts of Moscow.  

In 1991 Barbara Bush gave Rita Gorbachev a copy of this beloved Boston statue.  It was with great joy that I introduced my Russian friends to Mrs. Mallard and her children, and they learned for themselves what every grown Bostonian knows...the small ducks are really way too small for a grown person to sit on.

At the end of a long day we missed our bus home, but even after this last piece in a string of consecutively unsuccessful endeavors, I consider the day overall a success, a) because the second half was spent in relaxed exploring of parts and fountains, but more importantly b) see as follows: 

The most amazing part of this celebration was the way people would celebrate their vetrans.  People, such as this group here, brought huge bouquets of flowers to present to the men and women who served especially in WWII, but occasionally to just any person in uniform.  It is hard to describe really what a tremendously important event this was.  I can't really describe it as patriotism, I can't really describe it as pride, though in a sense it is both.  The closest I can say is that they are celebrating that they fought to the last to defend their families, their homes, and they won.  They won very decisively.  Russians won the war with the Germans, that's not really a question.  I'm not saying the US and the other allies didn't help, and that their help wasn't necessary, but Russians were the one who defeated the Nazis.  They preserved and saved their land and homes.  Many many many people died.  The Soviet Union lost 26 and a half million civilians and young soldiers, thats 13-14% of the population, but in the end they prevailed.  And that is felt very strongly here, and the respect and genuine pride of their vetrans kept sending shivers up and down my spine on this 90 degree day.  Even though we missed the parade, spent a half hour working our way out of the metro through the crush of people and the concert we wanted to go to didn't actually appear to exist, this day was entirely worth it just to be with, sing with, and celebrate with these vetrans as groups gathered around them sometimes with accordions  sometimes with dancing but always with flowers, words of thanks and many smiling faces.