daily photo moscow

merry christmoscow

st basils

I left this one big, click on it, and you can breathe in the atmosphere.

ice skaters in russian 2010 olympic gear

ice skating on red square in front of GUM department store

window display in gum

Look! Valenki!

americans in russia celebrate swedish holiday

 

Happy Santa Lucia Day!

tomorrow's outfit: wear white and a crown with candles

Tomorrow is Santa Lucia Day, celebrated one country over in Sweden. We have the little Santa Lucia clothespin dolls out we made a few years ago and my son and I made a cardamom bread to bake in the morning. He kneaded. First the dough was a monster, then a drum, then a hedgehog, then a patient getting a treatment for H1N1.

i love shots: a russian party primer

The first shot is for good health, the second is because you can't walk with one leg, the third is because God loves a trinity. A  horse with three legs is useless, so you need the fourth. After that it doesn't matter.

Living in Russia, you become well-acquainted with vodka, entire supermarket aisles are devoted to it and something in the leaden air made one friend give up her wine-of-the-month subscription and switch to the local drink. Drinking here is highly-stategized game--a way for people to judge who you really are, once your guard is down--sort of like golf at home. Regardless of how big a party school you went to, you can’t beat Team Russia at this game, but it’s nice if you don't show up with your uniform shirt on backwards. (Reminder: the blood alcohol limit when driving here is 0.0.)

Russians are renowned for drinking a lot of vodka and claiming to stay sober. They will tell you it’s not a biological inheritance, but the way they drink. Russian friends tell us our mistakes are not eating while drinking, mixing vodka with carbonated sodas, sugary mixers or juice, driving the alcohol into our systems. Americans seem to do everything we can to get drunk from the minimum amount of alcohol. Russians, on the  other hand, try to stay sober while drinking as much alcohol as possible.

“How do we do it?” my Russian friend asked. “It’s scientific. We try to neutralize the alcohol for as long as possible.” Pickle brine is scientific? Read on.

Pre-gaming Russian-style

My Russian friend says one hour before the party:
1. Eat a couple of boiled potatoes.
2. Drink one or two raw eggs.
3. Drink one or two table-spoons of olive oil. Sunflower oil will also do. This guarantees (insert eye-brow raise here) that at the party you will stay sober for at least one bottle of vodka. (“I’m not kidding!” my Russian friend says.) Raw eggs are the most important ingredient of the Russian pre-party preparations he says. 

The point is, eat something, you will probably have to down two or three shots and there will be appetizers, zakuski, but what you really need is a burger, fortifying you against the assault. Or go native with the potato/raw egg/oil strategy.

Now that you've joined the party

1. If you start drinking vodka – drink only vodka. No beer or wine. Sweet carbonated drinks are especially off-limits.

2. Before you take the shot, have your bite of food prepared and in the other hand. This is like doing crunches: exhale, take the shot, inhale, have a bite. 

3.Translating zakuski as appetizers isn't quite right. Zakuski are something to eat “zakusyvayesh” so you aren’t just drinking. Zakuski should contain the so-called alcohol neutralizers – acid, salt and oil. After you down a shot, eat salted cucumbers, caviar, marinated tomatoes or pickles. Follow with something oily, sardines, herring —“Only dogs drink vodka without herring,”—a slice of hard boiled egg, or shproty (small smoked sprats in olive oil.) Traditional Russian salads, like Olivier, containing some of the above ingredients are good too. All the heavy mayonnaise is beginning to make sense! A Polish friend says if there’s no zakuski, you can sniff the sleeve of your shirt.

4. Only the first three shots are obligatory. You have to take them if you want to appear civilized. After that you can skip one or two. Say, “Ya propuskayu” (“I make it slip,”) and cover your glass with your palm. This doesn’t mean you can abstain from drinking for rest of the party. It means you are a foreigner and you need a break.

A Russian friend explains some party traditions, “In Russia we party around a big table with bottles and zakuski. We drink only when someone makes a toast and we drink all together. The person who pours, makes the toast.”

To pour for yourself and not everyone at the table is a faux pas. Drinking by yourself makes people think you are an alcoholic, as does drinking for no reason. There must be a reason to drink, and that's why we must toast. After the toast—bud zdorov “be healthy,” for example— everyone is obliged to drink. Everyone at the party is supposed to make an original toast – being a foreigner is no excuse. So be prepared – learn one by heart.

5. The zakuski part of the party takes about an hour – an hour in Russian time being equal to four shots of vodka. Then we move on to the hot dishes, goryacheye. Even though zakuski tend to be filling, you should eat goryacheye because your hosts have been working and you want to show you appreciate their efforts. At this time foreigners can start drinking half shots, hopefully no one will notice.

6. Participate in the conversation around the table. Mental activity is the best method to keep you sober, says our Russian friend.  Don’t dominate the conversation, but rather, contribute to the ongoing banter. Keep up.

7. At the end of the party, ooh and awe at the beauty of the dessert, if homemade, or the exquisite choice your host made at the bakery. This demonstrates that you’re survived the party without dire consequences and are still coherent.

“There cannot be too much vodka, only not enough vodka,” oy, the morning after:

Keep a small bottle of beer in refrigerator, says my Russian friend. (“What?”) Wake up at about 5 in the morning, drink your beer and go back to bed. This he claims, prevents hang-over. But hair of the dog, a shot of vodka, proves you are an alcoholic and is frowned upon. If the early morning beer didn’t help, or you skipped it, try the classic sworn-by Russian hangover cure: a slurp of the brine from the pickle jar.

The Embassy Medical Unit recommends a couple Advil and a lot of water. Congratulations, you survived the game.

An unscientific sampling found discriminating locals recommend Beluga, Dolgoruki and Kaufman as top drawer vodkas perfect for drinking Russian-style—out of the freezer, neat—but by far the most often suggested brand: Russian Standard Imperial.

tulips inside, snow outside

Three in the afternoon, Moscow.

ismilova costumes

Ismilova is the all-Russian-things outdoor market we visited today.