Winter Fun

After our relatively warm trip to Croatia, we decided to get back into the winter spirit in Moscow by visiting a series of Christmas Markets.  This year Orthodox Christmas fell on January 8th, so all in all, our Christmas season lasted a very long time.  

We started off outside the Bolshoi theater, where the water fountains had been replaced with fountains of ice...

Along our route, we stopped to warm up with some grilled sausages and hot wine, which really hit the spot...

And there were some really spectacular Christmas trees along the way...

I also found the largest samovar I've ever seen.  A lot of people get really worked up about wanting to buy one while they are here, but I personally can't picture having one in our house.  To each their own.

As we neared the end of our Christmas sightseeing, we discovered that there is an Eliseev's store in Moscow - we had really enjoyed the one in St. Petersburg, so it was a nice treat to see it here.  The only thing that wasn't nice - both in the store and in the Christmas markets, was all the pushing and shoving that was going on.  I'm not sure I'll ever understand why people here seem to feel it's ok to physically push other people out of their way, but I'm also unlikely to ever just accept it, so I threw a few elbows in return myself when provoked.

Cafe Pushkin probably got the reward for gaudiest display.  It was actually hard to look at without squinting.

And of course, what would Christmas be without a pryanik - it's like a very mild gingerbread, filled with condensed milk.  So good, so sad they aren't around all year long...

Shortly after Christmas, winter hit it's stride and temperatures dropped back below freezing, after being in the 30's and 40's through Christmas. Actually, they dropped well below freezing, and below 0 Fahrenheit, and sometimes into the negative teens.  But the upside was that we got some snow and the clouds went away for awhile.  So we bundled up and went sledding in Victory Park.

 Winter also brought some drama to our house.  One afternoon, Stephanie was in the hall closet getting something out when Aiden came up behind her, closed the door, and locked the deadbolt.  We didn't know he could do that, and had never really thought about this possibility before, but in hindsight it seems rather foolish that they installed the lock outside the door.

So Stephanie was locked in the closet and Aiden quickly realized that she couldn't get out and became too upset to listen to her instructions.  She didn't have her phone with her to call me and even if she did I couldn't have gotten in because the deadbolt was closed on the front door.  Plus, it was another 4 hours before I would have gotten home and discovered that there was a problem.  Luckily, Stephanie is a quick thinker and we keep our tools in the closet, so she got a hammer and knocked a hole in the door so she could reach through and unlatch it!  Later, during the Olympics, when one of the skaters got locked in his bathroom, we got a lot of good jokes through Facebook about how Stephanie could have taught him a thing or two.

We read about some neat exhibits at one of the parks in Moscow and decided to head out to see them.  On the way, I saw this very interesting advertisement for live Christmas trees...

At the park, there was a house that had been constructed completely upside down, which made for some interesting photo-ops.  Even though we knew we were right-side-up, it was still disconcerting.

Aiden was pretty fascinated by a soviet-era ICBM that's on display in the park as well.

Then I took him to an animatronic exhibit of dinosaurs, which also included chronologically inaccurate features like a woolly mammoth and cave people. Aiden  was a little nervous at first by all the scary roaring and the fact that they were moving, but he was absolutely terrified of the friendly talking dinosaur with a cup of coffee at the entrance...

And continuing our frozen theme, we went to see this year's update to the ice carving park that we went to last year.  It was all new, and very impressive. It was so warm in December that they postponed the opening until January and some of the exhibits that should have had roofs suffered collapses, but it was still pretty neat.

We could also pretend to be martrushka's, but my favorite picture is Stephanie's pose on the throne.

As we were leaving the park, this old woman came up and started talking to me. She seemed to think I had lost a child because there was another child looking for his father nearby, but explained that Aiden is our only one.  Then we chatted a bit about the weather and so on, and then finally, she looked at me and said "You're foreign?"  with a look of great surprise.  It was a great feeling that I was able to fool her for so long!

That was pretty much the last weekend of Winter in Moscow.  After that, temperatures warmed up into the 40's and it hasn't snowed since.  Kind of disappointing, especially since they got so much more snow in Washington than here. It was also rather depressing as the warmer weather meant unending stretches of cloudy days. 

Of course, we've been busy since then.  Work has been crazy getting ready for the Olympics, and now with Ukraine.  But more on that later. I got to take a trip down to Sochi this past weekend and will get on to that topic when the pictures are ready.