Maslenitsa

The pancake tradition

In order to celebrate the maslenitsa week in Russia, we went, as a class to the museum of history of Irkutsk. We were taken there by Rima, but we also met up with Lara's group there, as this was to be a joint excursion of the museum. Once there, we were taken around by two Russian ladies dressed in their traitional dresses, who told us about the history of the maslenitsa tradition (including, of course, how people eat many pancakes throughout the week - indeed, people are meant to eat basically only pancakes (with a load of different fillings, working downwards in the size of the pancakes throughout the week until you get to the final day of maslenitsa, when you're meant to eat massive 'tsar-sized' pancakes.



Heijin, self, Lin-yoi, Lara, Rima, Sin, Aobo, Oxana, Tsya, Syani,
Tsyu-chuan, Seongs, Changmin, Tao, Minji, Hyo Eun, Tse-chui,
Mikeon, Yoonah



They then continued on by taking us all up to the second floor (us being Lara, myself, and our Korean and Chinese classmates) and proceeding to explain to us, that, it being Tuesday, people are meant to play games in which traditionally Russian women choose whom they will marry. This was quite fun, especially seeing how the Chinese and Koreans were very shocked and embarassed whenever these games were initiated, but they seemed to have a lot of fun all the same. Obviously, both of us being Europeans, Lara and I were inevitably paired up in all of the games, and I am sure that we were the only two people there whom the two Russian ladies could tell apart, as they kept getting all the Koreans and Chinese confused, and taking people to play several of the games consecutively, insisting that everyone had to play, depsite them having stood up in the previous one! After all the games were done, we had  a look around the museum and kept on receiving those curious glances from the Russians, who weren't quite sure what to make of all of our classmates running around and taking photos of each other!

Centre of Angarsk

On Wednesday, of course, I went off to Angarsk again. However, this time, as my computer was broken, I went with no supporting material and no information to be able to bring to the class, so I was looking at just playing it by ear. Surprisingly enough, I was given a whole new class of students for my English class today, and  thus managed to spend a lot of the time simply talking about  them and then jumping back to the topic which I've been continually asked to discuss with them - the family. Seeing as they were a new group, I could just repeat a lot of the same information which I had been using in the previous lessons, and blending into it some harder vocabulary for them - they seemed to be at a fairly advanced level, at least they understood most of what I said, which was fairly good. Still, as always, the students were fairly timid and only a couple of the older boys seemed willing to open up and talk. Eventually, of course, and in what I recognised instantly as a tactic to waste time and get the teacher speaking about a topic which isn't strictly relevant, one of the students asked me what I'm doing in Russia, which came at a very welcome moment, as my mind had just drawn a blank. This allowed me to happily speak about myself for the remaining few minutes of the lesson before I let them all loose. After the lesson, Tatiana came to me and gave me some suggestions for future lessons (something I appreciate - talking about the family for 8 weeks was not something I was looking forward to - apparently I'm allowed to stray a bit from the topic), and gave me a souvenir of Angarsk which she had got me as a sort of present, which was very nice of her.