From Russia With Love

Happy Women's Day!

Today we have off of school because it's the best holiday of the year...ha well after Christmas. Today is Women's Day which celebrates all women--they don't have Mother's Day like we do. On Friday, we got out of school early for the holiday and I've gotten about 5 bouquets of flowers. I got tons at school (and even some chocolate and other gifts) and at church and some on Saturday (more later on that). All weekend you'll see women walking around with flowers and they've even set up special flower shops just so men can easily buy them. There is a Russian superstition, though (just one among MANY) that an even number of flowers is bad luck or only for funerals or something so they give odd numbered bouquets.
Anyway there's this joke here that in Russia, men get 364 days so it's ok that women are celebrated for one day. It's so true, too. It's definitely a male dominated culture but Women's Day is turning out to be just fabulous.

On Saturday, me and my American teacher friends were invited by some of our Russian teacher friends to a public school on the outskirts of Moscow to have this sort of culture day. One of our friends is an English teacher there and they have been studying the United States so they invited us to have a question and answer thing with the high school kids and to teach them the Electric Slide. They also performed a Michael Jackson dance for us and the boy that was MJ wore the outfit and did his moves exactly! It was so funny but so good and fun to watch. Everyone was dressed up as cowboys to be American. We played this association game where the kids had to say words associated with America and we had to respond with a Russian association. They were way better at it. It was funny because we said things like The Nutcracker, Sputnik, Siberia, caviar, Tolstoy and they said things like fast food, McDonald's, Starbucks, and Spiderman...Then the kids gave us a tour of their school (it was so different from MES--it looked more like a real school lol) and told us about it all. They have this museum there and the lady that is sort of the "curator" for the museum told us all about it (it was translated for us) and she wore this costume and made us sit for pictures. They are celebrating the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II and there was a Russian war veteran there. We had coffee/tea with them and they asked us questions and showed us all the projects they had made having to do with the US (like a US flag with all the states written on the stars). It was so much fun and they treated us like celebrities! Seriously they were constantly snapping pictures of us (about 5 or 6 different people) and I felt so important. Then the headmaster invited us into her office and told us to come back anytime. They were all so nice and it was really neat to do something different and see something else! So yeah that was a good time.

Thennnn. Last night we went to the movies (it's tricky finding English movies. We had to go to this hotel with an English theater and the guy that owns it is named Glen and he's from Boston ha. But they had headphones for Russian translation). So the movie started late because they were using the theater for this motivational speaker and they went late. So Glen told us to go hang out and then he gave us his phone number to call in like 20 minutes to see if it would start. But anyway we saw Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio (so crazy...see it. It's totally weird). I felt so American because it was an English movie set in America.