Worst. Holiday. Ever.

Holidays are big here: since we've arrived, I've literally seen/heard 5 different fireworks shows. But the holiday I was most looking forward to (even more so than Women's Day), was Maslenitsa. Maslenitsa is sort of like Mardi Gras, except it lasts all week and involves a lot more eating and a lot less flashing. Any holiday in which you're expected to eat as much blini (like crepes) as possible has to be good, right? Wrong.

The celebration culminates on the final Sunday of the week. In St. Petersburg, this means there's a big fair-type festival at a park, which we decided to attend for the cultural experience. We took the metro to the park and, with great anticipation, bought our tickets and walked in. Our first tipoff that this was not going to meet expectations should have been this:
I'm not sure if this picture does it justice, but take a minute and look closely to find everything you can that's racist about this image.

After walking around for a few minutes and determining that there was in fact nothing to do, other than watch a man standing around on stage, we got in line for food. In preparation for the delights of maslenitsa, we had fasted all day and as such were more than ready for hot, savory shashliki (steak kabobs), followed by sweet blini. We picked the shashlik stand with the shortest line and waited, certain that our treats would be ready soon.

Fifteen minutes later, we recognized that my earlier judgment about capitalism in Russia (see next post) had not been off-base. The shashlik stand was a one-man operation: he grilled the shashliki. Then asked the customer how many that customer wanted. Then waited patiently as the customer paid. Then asked if the customer wanted bread or ketchup. Then moved on to the next customer. Even worse for us was that each customer, seeing how long it took to buy a single shashlik, bought 6 or 7 at once, so he had run out of cooked shashliki long before we made it to the front of the line. After a second round of this, only a few people stood in front of us, so we were certain to get shashliki this time around. But no — luck was not with us. Before putting another set of raw shashliki on the grill, the man lit up a cigarette and made a phone call. Then he walked off. At this point, we determined that he was out of shashliki altogether and had decided that leaving was the best way to prevent a riot from the hungry customers. Having spent an hour in this line with nothing to show for our efforts, we left in search of different food.

Maslenitsa does have some interesting traditions, I'll give it that. It's a holiday to celebrate the arrival of spring (so the fact that it occurs in late February is inexplicable), but blini are eaten because they are round and in the shape of a sun. One tradition I haven't quite figured out yet is the burning of scarecrows: one of my professors explained the meaning behind it, but I still see it as somewhat reminsicent of a KKK rally.

Before

After


All in all, it was a waste of an afternoon, but at least we did get to witness some traditional Russian pasttimes, such as sledding, in a chair, on a flat surface. Man these guys know how to have a good time.