And unfortunately, I had no camera...

My dad and I had a Fantastic time yesterday! We went to this pretty interesting... "festival" I guess you could call it. July 21 is the day that this water in a Russian village is blessed and holy, so people come from miles around to collect it.

It was in my dad's assistant/translator's hometown. Just some back ground on her family: Her father was able to acquire some land during perestroika (the Gorbochov reconstruction era where they basically gave away land as initiative for people to become private farmers), so they have a lot of land and a pretty nice house for Russia. Of course like 16 people live there!

I think the story of the water is something like Maria the mother of Jesus was also the protector and she appeared at different times to protect stuff and if there was a spring there it became holy, so July 21 was the day that she maybe appeared at this spring and so on this date everyone comes to collect its water. Genia's family is actually Protestant, so they didn't think too much of these people coming to their little village... and yes it very much is a village in the strictest sense. There's like 1 road with houses and every body knows everyone and is a farmer. Everyone in Genia's family asked if we had been there and the made a comment on how ridicules the whole thing is :-P

We walked through the hills (Genia said this part of the region is called "Little Switzerland" because of all the hills) to the spring. The spring was at the bottom of a valley, so as we were walking down the hills through the wild grass and wild flowers, I could see others coming from other parts of the hills. It was seriously like a scene from a movie, where there are pilgrims as far as the eye could see. At the bottom of the hill was a little little little shrine on top of a big pile of rocks. There were stairs going up both sides of the rocks leading up to the shrine, so the water was kind of surrounded by a half circle. The shrine had a tile portrait of Our Lady of Kazan and under that was a big pipe with water flowing out and under the spout a Huge crowd of people were in their bathing suites holding buckets and jugs of water. Genia said we'd also see pieces of cloth on the trees because the old pagan religion taught that if you cut a piece of clothing and hung it on a tree you could make a wish. Syncratism. We stood on both sides of that stairs and watched it. I was so sad I didn't have my camera! This was a sight like you'd see in National Geographic! Genia said that as it got later it would be more and more young people, sitting in the hill with "bonfires and guitars and things like that." If only my RSP comrades had been there. I was seriously missing them at that point.

After hanging out there for a while, we went back to Genia's for Russian pirogie (pastry pies) :-D Her babyshka made them. I'm going to miss that about Russia! When we were living in the Russian dorm, sometimes the Russian kids would give us food their babyshkas had made. Oh yum. It was Genia's cousin's 9th birthday, so we brought her a present too.

So the rest of this week will be going to Moscow today (Sunday), and the US on Wednesday!

PS. I had no camera :-( So all these pictures are from other random places on the internet.