Happy Easter!

I'm a day late again... sort of! Even though we didn't celebrate Easter here, we had a great weekend. The Russians don't celebrate Easter for several more weeks, as the Russian Orthodox Church (along with the majority of Eastern Orthodox Churches) follows the Julian calendar in determining religious holidays. (Christmas is celebrated on January 7th, and Easter, this year, on April 27th.) Anyways! Over the past few days we've been able to talk to some friends and family and that has been awesome.... we love skype. What else... okay, on Saturday night, we were all feeling pretty mellow; usually Saturday night involves a game, vodka and a smoky nightclub, but we were up for none of the above. SO! We had a sushi party! Freddy and I went and picked up Dasha and went to the airplane sushi restaurant to order the goods while Steve chilled out here. We all came back to our place, and after about an hour there was a delivery of the most delicious sushi spread.... it was SO GOOD! We are definitely going to do this more often, we had no idea that they delivered AND you can order online! That part might be problematic though, seeing as how their site is in Russian. We had a great night eating sushi, doing the puzzle, watching TV (movies are dubbed but you can kind of still hear the English if you really focus... ) and ??? Steve, Freddy and I are all hooked on The Office... and the two of them love quoting the show. After a while Dasha was convinced that she had to see it.... to see if it was really that funny. And it wasn't - it was lost in translation.


Easter Sunday was a pretty mellow day - there was no Easter bunny and we didn't do anything special for dinner (and we didn't go to church)... but! We did go ice skating! It was super fun!! We just recently found out that the ice rink where the local hockey team plays (that is a five minute walk from our place) is open to the public every now and then (we were unable to get a schedule....), so we went! We were unsure of where to go, and at the entrance to the bowling alley (part of the ice-rink-complex) met a very nice security guard who escorted us to the correct entrance and helped us throughout the entire process of procuring skates (they had Steve's size! We asked for the biggest ones...) to actually getting on the ice - he didn't hold our hands, but didn't disappear until we were skating. SO! The process was different than it is at home - there were lots of stations to visit to get skates, drop off your coat, and then your shoes, and at each station you're given a tag for your stuff, and tags indicating how long you can be on the ice. You can pay for half an hour or an hour: for the two of us, including skate rentals, an hour long skate cost 490 roubles, about $20. There are women that write your number down on a white board, and then call it out once your time is up. Vraiment interessant. It seems a bit expensive, no? It's strange... people don't seem to make that much money here, but most activities cost more here than they do at home. There were quite a few people there though.... not so many that Steve couldn't rip around - I felt a little shaky on my hockey skates.. I'm used to that pick... at least that's my excuse - we hadn't been skating in yeeeeears. Then, when our time was up, the security guard appeared and gave us each a present... a hockey puck! He was, without a doubt, the kindest stranger we've met here... it was so refreshing to be treated nicely when we've kind of gotten used to a rude, indifferent attitude from people that we don't know. It made our skating experience that much better... yay! So we had a great weekend.... and hopefully you did too! Happy Easter!