Blow-drying turkeys and moisturizing Lenin

On Thanksgiving, my laptop broke. Therefore, I'm stealing my roommates' computers when I can to email and blog the next few weeks. We'll see if I can get all of this in:

Thursday the 25th: THANKSGIVING
Thanksgiving here in Russia was pretty fantastic. To begin the day, we dressed ourselves up like Indians and went to another school (the same one we taught at for Halloween) to give the kids presentations on why and how we celebrate Thanksgiving. Along with a powerpoint describing our typical day, down to the traditional Thanksgiving day nap, we had fun playing a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey form of American football and making a giant hand turkey.


Us with Lenna, the school's principal. Probably the most energetic lady I've ever met.

After classes, we were served Thanksgiving dinner at the school--which even included turkey. Turkey here is such a delicacy (we paid over 1200 rubles for our own dinky little 10 lb. one), so at lunch, Lenna ushered us to our own special table, got the attention of the 100+ kids and parents in the cafeteria, and made this huge production of presenting the turkeys to us. There were two teeny ones all decoratively placed on platter with a bed of salad--it was so cool of them to do that for us. Once they were placed on our table, the kids and parents all started clapping and cheering. After which we had to have a photo shoot with the turkeys for a few minutes--they probably thought that American girls dressed up as Indians with turkeys was a very American moment that deserved photographing.

We got into the whole thing a bit and even made up Indian names. Mine was Little Bear--hence the claw on the face. My favorite was probably Dani's: "Whomping Willow."


That night, we had our own big Thanksgiving dinner with most of the other American teachers. We've got the fanciest place, so we hosted, which put us 5 girls sort of in charge of the cooking. None of us had ever cooked a turkey before, and I was in charge of making the stuffing. Which I'd never made before, either. Consequently, I spent a good chunk of the time we cooked asking my dad at work for help. Thanks, Dad.

"Tasting" the buttery junk that goes into stuffing. No wonder stuffing is so good.


How to thaw a turkey:


Cooking was fun, and so was eating it.

We also all did a tradition we like to do in my family: having everybody write on a small piece of paper what they're thankful for, put it in a bowl and go around the room reading them. Not surprisingly, most of the papers had something to do with being grateful for technology that allowed us to keep in touch with our families--despite the great day we'd all had, I think not being home for Thanksgiving had us all a bit homesick.

Speaking of keeping in touch with family, my awesome Thanksgiving was wrapped up with a giant GoogleChat session with a lot of my immediate and extended family back in Cowley before they ate. It was really good to see/hear from them, and I am more excited than ever to see people at Christmas.

Saturday the 27th: HOCKEY
On Saturday, we got to see Moscow's pro ice hockey team, "HC Spartak," play Siberia's "Omsky Avangard." We ended up being seated in the visiting team's section, and their fans were very lively--definitely much more alcohol and crazy enthusiasm than what I remember being at the USU vs. BYU hockey game I went to last year.


L-R Kaitlyn, Sarah, me, Whitney, Dani

Well, we all got into shouting the cheers with them. Even though we usually had no idea what we were saying (one of the cheers sounded like "yist reeba," which if it were the case, would be like yelling "eat fish!" So, we may have heard that one wrong).

Moscow is the team in... you guessed it, red (Russians definitely love that color).


Probably the strangest part of the night, though, happened after the game. After "our" hockey team won, we all started to pack up, until we noticed dozens of Russian policeman completely encircling/blocking off our section of the stands, while Moscow's fans exited the arena. They kept us there for a full 20 minutes--why, though, we don't really know. From what we've heard (and saw), Russians really like their hockey. Perhaps we were being protected from any drunken angry Moscow fans? Who knows.

Our fellow, very jubilant "Omsky Avangard" fans. Notice the team scarves: almost everyone had one, and waved it around after the game.


"My My's!"
After the hockey game, we were all cold and starving. So we decided to check out a place called "My My's" (Moo Moo's), which my sort-of cousin Jason Despain, who served a mission in Moscow, recommended.

My analysis: best borsch I've had in Russia. Super sweet and delightfully chunky. I'm going to miss borsch very much.

Tuesday the 30th: LENIN'S TOMB
Since our time in Moscow is running thin and we still have much to see, we decided to make our first weekday excursion into the big city to see what all the fuss about this tomb is all about. It happened that it was the coldest day we'd had so far, so we bundled-up as much as we could and made the half-mile trek to Gorki-9. Where we quickly learned that the road was completely shut down--the president obviously wanted to get to work in a hurry again. So we waited. And waited. Finally, on the verge of frostbite, we all walked down the road a ways and found a warm bus to climb onto. Where we waited again.

Two hours later, we finally got into Moscow (it usually takes us about 35 minutes), took the metro, and hiked over to the tomb. I don't think I've ever been so cold--I wouldn't have lasted a day in one of those Russian work camps.

Whitney and I trying to take our mind off the cold with Kaitlyn's phone while she bought a pastry:


In case you weren't aware (I wasn't until a few weeks ago), one reason this tomb is such a must-see is that it is quite the scientific feat: you actually see Lenin: two days after he died in 1924, he was embalmed, and is now on display in this dimly lit, very red (of course) room inside of a glass case. After our huge trek to get there, we were actually inside the tomb for 90 seconds tops. Which was fine by me, though, because the whole thing is a bit creepy.

Lenin:


And gross. As you can imagine, preventing a person from decomposing for 80+ years requires a lot of work. Some poor soul is paid to lotion up and inject preservatives into Lenin everyday, and then give him a special chemical bath every year and a half. Ugh, makes me queasy just typing about it.

A close-up of his face... in case I wasn't descriptive enough, ha.


Overall, the trek was definitely worth it: now, the next time I feel like complaining about a job, I can just remind myself that hey, at least I don't have to moisturize Lenin.

On that lovely thought... my time is up. I can't believe its December already. Where has the time gone?! I'm getting progressively more excited to go home/sad to be leaving, all at once.

THE END