Russian Holidays

The last weeks in Russia were full of holidays. Starting on the 23. February with the celebrations for the day of the Red Army and ending two days ago with the international women‘s day. Last week Russia celebrated Maslenitsa for one week, which is sort of a pancake week to celebrate the end of winter. My friends and I prepared Russian blinis (pancakes) on various occasions with various kinds of fillings, side dishes and beverages. However, the negative side effect of Maslenitsa is that you eat far too many Blinis, so that you are not able to eat any more blinis for the next couple of weeks. The international women‘s day is a very important and big event in Russia. Every man has to make or buy presents (in most cases tulips) for all the women who are important in their life - be it a good friend, your wife or your working colleague. We also celebrated all these holidays at work, with a lot of alcohol and food. However, there is a difference to how holidays and bridging days are handled in Russia in comparison to Europe. When a holiday falls on a working day, you don’t have to work on that day, but you have to work on Saturday the following week.

Yoshkar Ola

Everyday life has also reached me in Moscow. Working, meeting friends, parties, speaking Russian and so on. Therefore, it was a relief that one of my organisations decided to send all volunteers from my organisation to a seminar in Yoshkar Ola to talk about Alternative Civilian Service in Russia. So, finally a reason to write a new blog entry. Hurray. I’ve never heard of the city Yoshkar Ola before. It’s the capital of the autonomous republic Mari El in the Russian Federation. It’s quite a small republic with only about 800,000 inhabitants, of which around 250,000 live in Yoshkar Ola. The city is located a bit more than 600 kilometres east from Moscow, thus, the other volunteers and I had a 15 hour train journey ahead of us, which was perfect for catching up on the latest news in our projects. On our journey we spoke with some people from Yoshkar Ola, who taught us that there lives an ethnic group of Mari people in Mari El, who even have their own language (Mari). They make up aproximately 40% of the population.

I kind of liked the city. It’s of course cheaper than in Moscow (especially taxis - 1 Euro per taxi ride, not per person), and there are quite some interesting and pretty buildings. We lived in a hotel and soon got to know Russian volunteers from various organisations who showed us Yoskar Ola. We also visited a children’s home 2 hours away from Yoshkar Ola, where the Russian volunteers played a theatre play to educate the children about various social problems. However, the most time consuming activity of the seminar was of course the discussion about alternative civilian service in Russia. The German volunteers explained the situation in Germany and the Russian side outlined the problems of civilian service in Russia. For example, men who decide to do such a civilan service do not have the right to choose where they are going to work. So the authorities for example might tell them to work in a post office or even at a military factory, which is of course not the idea behind such a service.

Overall, we had a lot of fun, we met interesting and kind people, talked a lot, learned about Mari El and the situation of Russian volunteers.