It might be getting warmer.

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Hello,
Once again, I apologize for not writing in so long. The weeks get so busy, and then it's been over a week again. This week was especially crazy. We had six days of classes! It was killer. This weekend is the celebration of Ма́сленица (Maslenitsa). In other places it is celebrated as Shrovetide. It is celebrated in the week leading up to Lent. It began as a religious celebration, but now it is more of a folk holiday. The festivities are nothing like I have ever seen. Today we went to a huge celebration; there were several throughout the city. There were people in costumes, including men dressed as ostriches playing football. There were crafts and tons of effigies to buy and burn in celebration. Best of all, there were blini to eat. The holiday is celebrated by eating blini and butter, so there were tons of blini stands and delicious food to eat. All in all, the week has been busy, and the weekend was even busier.
Monday, we had no classes, and Yesterday was Women's Day, so still no school. I took a cooking class with Misha and a few other people from the program. We learned to make Blini, Schy (cabbage soup), beef stroganoff, and several other things. Last night, we had a feast at our home with my host- family and a few of their friends. There was a ton of food and plenty of champagne. My mamma told me that we would drink the French champagne first, because it's nicer, and then we would move on to the Russian champagne.
Today, I wasn't feeling so well. Perhaps there was something for dinner last night that didn't sit well. I'm not certain, but I woke up with stomach pains. :/
What else?... The weekends have been the same as always, easy Fridays, dancing all night on Saturdays. We've been hanging out with Tanya a lot, and trying to meet some other friends. Sometimes, that doesn't work out as well as we want. Last weekend, Jen met a few men who we though seemed pretty ok. It's usually easy to tell who the creeps are, but this guy seemed pretty nice. We split up for a little while, Jen stayed at Dacha with a few people, and Tanya and I went next door to Fidel to dance for a while. When Tanya and I returned, the men had decided to up their game quite a bit. They were trying to convince Jen to go home with them. Luckily, I was feeling blindly brave, and I yelled at them and pulled Jen away. We got into a pretty heavy argument, the men and I, which resulted in my getting slapped. With a few colorful words, I told the creeps to get away and shoved one into the snow (not my smartest idea). Jen, Tanya and I quickly left the scene and headed out to reconnect with Kevin before returning to the metro. That was definitely the most intense thing that has happened, and of course I kept the details short. I figured an overview would suffice, and the details might cause some people to worry. I keep telling people that this is a beautifully dangerous city, and that really seems to be the best way to describe it.
Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully my posts will be more frequent and filled with more interesting detail, but for now, I have to finish studying and get some rest.
Be well.

xoxo

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