Hyvää Pääsiäistä / Happy Easter!
Easter is something that I have been looking forward to here, because there are some very different traditions than we have in Canada. To start with, on the Sunday before Easter Sunday the younger kids all dress up and go from door to door with willow branches. The tradition is to dress up as a witch, kind of similar to our Halloween witches. They decorate willow branches with brightly coloured feathers, ribbons, or other things. Then they go around to people's houses, and just like trick or treating, they knock on the door and say "Virvon, varvon, tuoreeks tirveeks, tulevaks vuodeks, vitsa sulle, palkka, mulle!" (I wave a twig for a fresh and healthy year ahead, a twig for you, a treat for me). Then the children get candy, chocolate, or sometimes money, and they give away the decorated willow branch. There are some traditional foods that are quite different as well. For starters, mämmi. Mämmi is a really thick, dark, pudding that is made from rye. It is quite strong, and most people either love or hate it. I tried it twice, once a month or so before Easter, and then again on the Saturday over Easter weekend. While it is not my favourite as it is quite strong, I can eat it if there is enough cream over it. Another traditional food is Pasha, which is a thicker pudding, it is kind of creamy and sometimes can have little fruits inside of it. It is really hard to describe the taste, but it is good. I also had karjalanpaisti for dinner one night. That is a traditional Finnish meat stew that originates from Karelia, an area in the east of Finland. I made my mom's sugar cookies that we always have around Easter time, and we had lots of chocolate eggs. There were regular small Easter eggs, kinder eggs, and then the special, very Finnish one, is called Mignon, and it's from the main Finnish chocolate brand, Fazer. It is an egg with a real shell that it totally solid chocolate. It is kind of like a nougat instead of just chocolate, it's slightly softer. It was a lot of chocolate, I would not want to eat more than one, and even one was almost too much. But it was good, and kind of cool that it had a real eggshell around it that I had to take off like a normal egg. On Saturday I helped out at a theatre stand in a Easter Market in the old town in Naantali. There were only a few stands, it was pretty small, but it was fun. There were 6 of us from theatre, we were all dressed up. We had an Easter bunny, a witch, a cat, and a mother hen with two chicks. We were running a Lucky Wheel, so people could spin the wheel for free and get candy or a small prize, while at the same time we had posters up for the show. Some of the little kids were sooo happy and it was so much fun to make them happy. It was also nice to get to know a few of the people from the theatre that I didn't know very well. I spent Easter with my friend's family, because my host family was going up to visit my dad's mom, and I had to be at the theatre over the weekend. So I spent it with one of my friend's from theatre, and I know her mom quite well because she is the director. Her family was so welcoming and so nice, I had a really good time. They also had new kittens, one that was almost two weeks old and four that were around a week. They were so so cute! Spring is definitely here, and summer will be coming soon. The weather has gotten so much warmer, and there are lots of flowers starting to come! March 28th-31st was our 2nd Rotary trip! We went to St. Petersburg. The first day, we got on a bus pretty early in the morning. Then drove all the way there, picking up some more exchange students in Helsinki as well, and met the other bus that had started from Seinäjoki near the border. It took us a while to get across the border as there were a lot of us, and we had two buses. We had to go inside and get out papers checked while the buses were getting checked as well, and doing that twice took quite a bit of time. We finally got to our hotel around 19.30, and we got our room assignments and then met for dinner, which was a four-course traditional meal. Driving into St. Petersburg was really eye opening. I had heard about it and seen a few pictures and such, but seeing things with your own eyes is always different. On the outskirts of town so many buildings were so totally run down. They would have boarded up windows, patched up walls, badly painted, and just really not doing well. Although they looked like they could have been so nice if they had been in decent condition, they were all old but had some interesting towers or shapes to them at times. And then there would be a neighborhood with many houses, and in the middle of them there would be one that had burned, and there would just be part of the frame, or just a few blackened walls. Then closer to the town there were apartment buildings. Every single one looked the same. They were square and there were no decorations or anything other than just these blank walls in either grey or dull red. It didn't help that it was a pretty grey day that day, but the first impression was certainly pretty dismal. Once we actually got into the city we could see alllll the palaces lining the roads, and those were decorated and painted and had carvings and such around them. The wealth separation was so visible, and it was so different from what I am used to.
The next day we went to see the Hermitage museum. It is the second largest museum in the world. It is made up of 6 buildings, 5 of which are open for viewing. They are the Winter Palace; Small, Old, and New Hermitages; and the Hermitage theatre. It could easily take a couple of months to get through the whole collection, so we saw what were called the "highlights of highlights". The details and decorations in the rooms, and the size of some of them, were absolutely amazing. It was beautiful, I had seen a few pictures but never could have imagined that. We had about a two hour guided tour, which was nice because we learned a lot and I most definitely would have gotten lost otherwise. After lunch we went to another museum, the Kuntskamera which houses Peter the Great's Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. That was nothing like I have ever seen before as well. Parts of it had displays with things from history from all sorts of different groups around the world, things such as clothing, tools, and weapons. Having multiple smaller displays from such different cultures so close together was interesting because we could compare them pretty well, you could really see some similarities and differences based on location. The other part of it had lots of human abnormalities, as well as just things you don't see in common museums. There were multiple fetuses in jars, some human skeletons and limbs, but also abnormalities such as fetuses with two heads, or extra arms, or two bodies joined at the hip with only one pair of legs. That evening after dinner we went to see a Folklore show at Nikolay's Palace. The palace was beautiful, with a huge central staircase and then a balcony that went all the way around. The room the show was in was pretty small, but it was nice because it meant we were all close to the stage and could see well. The show was music and dance, and was amazing. There was a wide variety of Russian music and dancing, and then within all the different pieces they told a little story. It was unlike anything I have seen before, and so much fun, that was an experience I will not forget. Our second and last full day in St. Petersburg wasn't quite as busy. In the morning we went sightseeing, so we drove around the town on the bus and our tour guide was talking the whole time. Then we stopped at a few places and would have 5 to 10 min to go around and take a bunch of pictures before getting back on the bus and driving to the next place. Although it wasn't the nicest to spend so long on the bus (traffic could be pretty bad on Nevksy Prospect, the main street), it was a good way to see a lot of the city. Then we had a few hours to walk around on our own. That evening we went to see the Nutcracker. We were sitting pretty far away from the stage as it was a large theatre, so we couldn't see the actors' expressions as well, but the show was still amazing. Ballet is such a beautiful form of dance, and they were all so talented they made everything look so easy! That evening when we got back to the hotel was pretty nice as well. I had been in contact with a few of my friends from my school in Victoria, and found out that they were on a trip to Russia as well, that they were in St. Petersburg at the same time that I would be, and then found out that they were staying at the same hotel as us. I had met a few of them really briefly in the hotel in the morning, and then a few more when walking around the city, but now I had a chance to actually see them and spend some time with them after eight months away. It was a little weird seeing them on the other side of the world, and for such a short time, but it was really nice at the same time. We left the next morning. We stopped at one marketplace that was just a big building filled with little and bigger booths selling absolutely everything, and walked around there for a little bit. Then started the long drive home. It didn't take us quite as long at the borders, so it only took us 11 hours to get home, but it was still quite a long day. It was so nice to be able to see a bunch of the other exchange students again, and visiting Russia was an experience I will never forget. Many more pictures are in the Photos section |
AuthorHi! My name is Katerina, and I am on exchange in Finland for a year! Archives
April 2019
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