New Year's Eve

What’s worse than a day of shopping in Russsia’s New Year rush? That’s right. Having your face grated off by a cheese grater and then being hung, drawn, and quartered. Although there’s not much in it. But another thing that’s worse than a day of shopping in Russia’s New Year rush is TWO days of shopping in Russia’s New Year rush, and that’s exactly what your intrepid narrator decided to do.

I got up early on the morning of the 31^st December, seeing as I had an entire party to cook for, a ton of presents to wrap, and two gifts still to buy. The mug that I wanted to buy for Lena was located in the centre of town, and the T-shirt printing place where I was to get my special design printed for Eldar was in the trading quarter, which, for those of you who are geographically-inclined, is the exact opposite direction to the centre of town. So that wasn’t great planning by me.

Getting to the mugs place was less of a schlep than I expected. There was a designated bus lane most of the way there, so we flew past the traffic jams which were taking up the rest of the road, presumably stretching all the way back to Vladivostok. They were very nice mugs. Like, think of the nicest mug you can imagine. It was probably that kind of level of mug. I figured you can never have too many really nice mugs as presents for unexpected occasions. I bought five. You can laugh, but I actually gave all of them away before the end of the week. Boom.

Getting to the trading quarter was less simple. I took the bus back to roughly where I lived, then realised that it would be quicker to walk, so got off the bus and sort of shuffled/ran the rest of the way. This was the same place where I went the day before with Kirill for the food shopping by the way. Soooooo I decided to do a food shop first. Awful planning. It was even more crowded than the day before. I only got a few things which I thought could be useful at the party – mandarins, fizzy drinks, snacks, that sort of thing. But it still took me a good hour, including twenty minutes queuing for a till. When I finally finished my shop I found the T-shirt printing stand. The guy there seemed a bit flustered. I emailed him my design, selected a roughly appropriate T-shirt, and paid. He told me there was a queue to get the T-shirt itself printed – one hour. So I found myself carrying an hour’s worth of shopping round a shopping mall for an hour wondering what to do with my hour. In the end I went to KFC. Always a good shout. Then I planned what order to cook the food in that afternoon (if I ever got home). Then I went down to the counter to collect my T-shirt. Nah. Not ready. The guy needed another half hour.

Long story short the T-shirt was printed before 2020, which was a relief. The T-shirt itself was also absolutely sick. Eldar once told me that he’d dress more boldly if he wasn’t bothered about how much money it would cost. So Olga and I photoshopped him into a leopard-print coat, shades, and boots, with a gold chain. It was an interesting design for a T-shirt. Let’s just say nobody will ever be in doubt as to whether or not he’s a gangster now…

I got home at 3p.m. I wasn’t sure when a Russian New Year’s Eve party started, but I was pretty sure that, unless it happened to be midnight, we wouldn’t manage to cook everything in time. Bizarrely, it turns out that a Russian New Year’s Eve party DOES start at more or less midnight. Our guests turned up just before twelve, with some arriving at more like one. And, with the help of Masha and her friend Polina, we had cooked all three (revolting) salads, some pizzas, sausage rolls, and some cakes and sweet things by the time they got here.

As we all sat down at the table, I asked what you do at a Russian New Year’s Eve party. Everyone scratched their heads a bit, presumably wondering the same thing. Then I said ‘I’ve heard the President’s speech is a big thing, right?’ Everyone laughed sheepishly right on cue, as if there was an unspoken rule showing that you needed to communicate your embarrassment about the President’s speech before showing your enthusiasm. After three short, synchronised chuckles from everyone around the table, people started saying ‘hey, maybe we should watch the President’s speech. You know, just to show Theo…’ It quickly became apparent that we were going to watch the President’s speech.

Possibly the most Russian picture ever taken...

The President’s speech was as uninspiring as I expected it to be. The highlight by far was the national anthem at the end. If you have not yet listened to Russia’s national anthem, go and listen to it, and then we can resume being friends. I can’t claim to know all the words by heart, but the words that I knew I belted out at a very distasteful volume considering it was midnight. Man don’t care.

Then, after we’d eaten so much food that we couldn’t eat any more, we decided to go out for a walk and watch the fireworks in order to burn space for some more food. In Russia, New Year fireworks are politely delayed by fifteen minutes in order to allow everyone to eat and watch the President’s speech before going outside to watch. Merry Russians were emerging from all the entrances to our house just as we were going out on our walk. Someone had brought some sparklers, so we all lit our sparklers and waved them about. Fun fact: sparklers still sparkle under a foot of snow.

Then we all walked to the nearest park, where a jovial dad was throwing his kids down a small hill. The kids would pick themselves up at the bottom, brush themselves down, and dizzily sprint back up to the top of the hill for another go. We decided that this looked like fun. When we got to the top of the hill, I realised that it didn’t look like quite as much fun from up there. As I was voicing this concern, Max had the genius idea of picking me up and dropping me down the hill à la negligent father. It was great fun, and only very painful.

As we shook the snow off our coats, we noticed a family gathered round a mysterious looking box in a clearing opposite. It could only be poorly set-up fireworks. We made a beeline for the clearing, and stood a sensible distance from the family who, it seemed, had utterly no idea how to use fireworks. They’d tried sort of digging them into the snow at first, but they couldn’t light the fuses, so they ended up just resting them on top of the snow. By the looks of things, they’d been there for a while already. But it was only as we arrived that they finally got the first fuse to light. As the first rockets lit up the sky above the park, the family ran away from the boxes screaming with laughter and pain. Mainly laughter. From what we could tell, the guy who was too close to the first fireworks wasn’t too hurt, because he then went on to light all the rest of them too. The fireworks lit up the low tree which we were stood under, its branches heavy with snow. It was rather a picturesque moment. Shame I was too busy taking photos of it to appreciate that at the time.

On the way home, we took it in turns to hum a melody, and the rest of the group had to guess what song it was. We walked home through the low wooden houses, which all had icicles hanging from their painted awnings. At home, we ate some more, exchanged presents, and then watched a film so awful that only one person managed to stay awake through the whole thing. That person wasn’t me – I fell asleep after about five minutes.

P.S. in the kitchen we have one of those tables that pulls out to become a bigger table. This was what Max brought to the table-expanding process