So Much Business

I have been busy busy busy! Which is a fabulous feeling! Warm Home cookie packaging and Purim planning and mission receptions oh my! Work and life have really picked up, and I am actually going to be very busy through June! So many exclamation points!

Aside from work being busy (and rewarding), I have had a couple of super fun adventures in the past couple of weeks. The first was Maslenitsa, my favorite holiday of all time. I feel that it is best explained in an anonymous post from Matt and Alyson's St. Petersburg blog, so I have copied and pasted it below. Also, check out my pictures. It really is the best holiday possible.

Masleniza is an ancient Russian holiday. It was the most important holiday. Masleniza is a meeting of spring. Russian very much wait this holiday, in fact it (he) means arrival of long-awaited spring! The spring is means, there is no cold more, is warmly and the Sun! The person from hay which burn name the Scarecrow. The scarecrow is a winter. In a scarecrow put leaves with desires which are always executed. When the scarecrow burns it is necessary to speak " Gori,Gori yasno chtoby ne pogaslo " (Burn, burn clearly, that would not die out!) Farewell to Winter is accompanied by pancakes with caviar, vodka, songs and dances. Masleniza lasts week, to it Russian get fat on twokgs and drink vodka in 10 times more usual!

Right.

This past weekend I went to Warsaw! It was part business trip, as I visited Aviva, the JSC volunteer there, but mostly relaxing/crazy sightseeing and shopping. Warsaw rocks! I think that Kiev could be that awesome/European in maybe 10 years...It is a really cool mix of crazy Soviet architecture and scariness, Old European neighborhoods, and neauvo-European restaurants and stores. Me likey.

In addition to checking out the city, doing some much needed shopping, eating of delicious and somewhat healthy food, and drinking lots of pivo s sokom (beer with delicious raspberry syrup. mmm!) paid for by new Irish friends, getting to know about Aviva's life and job as a JSC volunteer was also very interesting and valuable. Our jobs are not SO different, as she is also doing a lot of elderly social welfare programming, but her life and the community there are totally different.

The community there is VERY insular...all of the Jewish communal organizations are housed either in the synagogue or the building next to it. Aviva's apartment and her friends' apartment are across the street from the synagogue...all of this is in the old Jewish ghetto...The whole community really has a shtetl feel to it. For Shabbat dinner we ate at the super religious Jewish Graveyard Keeper's house...I'm not kidding...So its nice that everything is so close, but it also means that Aviva seems to be always sort of "on call." People call her all the time to do different favors/errands/babysit their kids...its nice that she's so involved, but I like that when I leave work, I have really left work. A good example: after shul on Friday night the Rabbi informed Aviva that a guy in the process of converting would be spending the night at her apartment....he slept on the floor as I had reserved the mattress...It just goes to show how every JSC placement is unique.

So Warsaw kicks ass. So does Maslenitsa.