A Fair in Štramberk

Fairs are the same everywhere - they are never attractive, they are spectacle and noise, they twist humanity into a strange mess and they almost never have anything to do with the town that hosts them. When we arrived in Štramberk, a town in the far eastern reaches of Moravia, it was immediately apparent that something out of the ordinary was happening. Cars and families on foot were streaming up the hill towards the center. We almost turned around, but decided to see what was going on.
The pretty, medieval town of timber houses and pretty churches had been converted into a playground of tinny music and whirling rides. We hoped, when it became evident that there was a fair in town, that there would be some flavor of the pretty surrounding countryside, or of the Wallach culture we'd read about. Instead, there was only the heavy smell of grease and a whirl of artificial motion.
The food was particularly unappealing. Deep-fried pancakes were plentiful, as was marzipan. There was no fresh fruit nor any green vegetables, but plenty of packaged sausages and a slew of stands selling alcohol. The local Medovina liquor presented itself in many varieties, and we should have tried it, but we are less brave about the zero tolerance drunk-driving law than most Czechs.
The local brewery was packed, of course, and offered us a nice respite - not from the crowds, but from the artifice. It was cool and dark inside, with a hushed clientele and nice (small) glasses of dark and light unfiltered brew. For a moment, it felt like any other Sunday, with only drunk locals for company.
From the top of the Trúba tower, a single pillar rising above the town, the crowds seemed even further away, though the music and amplified barking still drifted up from the carnival depths. It seems a shame to feel chased away from such an appealing place, but it's also not our town. Carnivals and fairs aren't for tourists, they're for the people of the place, who don't mind having their town transformed for a few days. The sleepy village is still there, of course, even if we didn't get to see it.

Carnival

We arrived in Venice with little advance warning that we'd be there during carnival. It was fun, crowded and crazy. I'm not someone who likes to wear a costume, but I don't mind when other people do.
It was great, though there are too many people. Venice isn't a big place, but sixty-five thousand people come in on every weekend day during the festivities. It made it difficult to move around, even, in the crowded little streets. Also, there were a lot of drunk American and German kids there for a more New Orleans, Mardi-Gras type experience, which was offputting.
It was still a wonderful time, and it was easy to get excited about the things being worn. The getups ranged from the simple to the extravagant. Some people rent costumes (or just buy a mask) and others arrive in the city with multiple garment bags and a year's worth of planning.
There is some kind of official judging ceremony and a number of balls, but the main point is to walk around and have your picture taken. The costumed people stopped and posed whenever they saw a camera, and there were almost as many photographers in the streets as revelers (though there were way, way more regular tourists than either).
Often, there were whole groups of coordinated outfits, worn by groups of friends or a whole family.
These two little ones were being initiated early.
One interesting thing about the experience: usually, the people in costume don't speak when they are walking around - so it's impossible to know if they are Venetian, Italian, American or something else.
Two gentlemen who were very enthusiastic about having their picture taken.
There's a lamp at the top of the Rialto that was a popular hangout spot after dark. The light was soft and bright enough that flash wasn't necessary and everything was very dramatic. Also, the view helped. I'm not sure if these two were friends or not.
Children also dress up, though they usually are off the streets before dark. It's a similar thing to Halloween, it seems, minus the candy. This little girl was chasing bubbles around in a princess outfit, which was cute.
As the night went on, the costumes and partying got wilder and stranger.

Merry (Russian Orthodox) Christmas!

Today is Russian Orthodox Christmas (they go by the Julian calendar which is 13 days behind the internationally used calendar. So, technically it's December 25th today). It seems like any other day here, really. Our teacher, Irena, laughed a bit when we wished her a Merry Christmas this morning and said that "only really religious people do special things" when I asked if she was having a special dinner tonight. Well, I thought, there must be a lot of really religious people then, because we've been seeing signs of Christmas festivity everywhere!
This little Christmas tree is in our hostel room (the Estonian finger puppet on top is mine). Lights and trees are all over the city and Christmas carols have been playing in loop at the local cafe. So, it's been a little hard to believe how small of a deal the holiday is today.
I mean, check out this Christmas market! Doesn't seem too religiously observant to me. The performer's voice boomed so loudly that we didn't linger too long, just long enough to grab two cups of hot wine. Hot beer was also available, but we didn't try it.
When buildings that look like this are your backdrop, you really have to take the whimsy up a notch at your festivals.
Now imagine being surrounded by all this eye candy, hearing a man's voice singing children's songs booming in the distance and then running into these photo op actors. I felt like I was the only human in a cartoon and was half expecting Roger Rabbit to pop out from behind a tree or Paula Abdul to start dancing with a cat.
I mistook this man handing out flyers for Santa Claus (so did this kid), when he was really just Grandfather Frost. You see, all of this Yuletide-type festivity is actually attached to New Year's Day - which is why today, Christmas Day, just isn't a big deal. Russians weren't allowed to be religious during the Soviet era, so they kept Christmas traditions alive by shifting them to New Year's. Since 1992, Christmas has been reinstated, but New Year's Day still remains the bigger deal holiday.

New Year's, Christmas, whatever gives me the chance to enjoy a few more glasses of hot wine in a plastic cup is holiday enough for me.

Hoogvein

Merlin: Hot Winter Drink? Must be hoogvein! Also known as Glögg, Glühwein, Vin Chaud or just mulled wine. The difference between regular wine and hoogvein is, naturally, the temperature and the mulling spices. Traditionally - though it's made differently everywhere - the wine has generally been cooked with citrus, sugar, cinnamon sticks, vanilla pods and cloves.
Rebecca: European Christmas markets always have mulled wine, but Tallinn's was served with add-it-yourself trail mix! I'm pretty convinced I could survive and possibly even thrive on a nut-filled hoogvein diet.
Merlin: Like I said earlier, we never bought anything in the market except for Hoogvein, but we did buy it fairly often. It was a nice thing to hold while walking through the frigid streets. Nobody can fault you, in the absence of to-go coffee, for carrying a hot beverage, even if it happens to be alcoholic. In fact, the liquor inures you more to the cold than tea, cocoa or coffee possibly could.

Rebecca: While I was home in New York, I visited the Union Square Christmas market and was dismayed to find that there was no hot wine available for purchase. Logically, I knew this would be the case, but some part of me was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
Merlin: As you can see, most of the nuts and raisins sank to the bottom, so it was difficult to get at them until the end. It was also kind of tough to slurp up the ones that were floating on top - kind of like miniature apple-bobbing.
Rebecca: I was always careful to scope out the trail mix offerings so that I was sure to choose a vendor that had brazil nuts. I always thought my favorite nut was the brazil nut, but it turns out my real favorite nut is a wine-soaked brazil nut.
Rebecca: Hoogvein in cafes/restaurants is just not as good. Most in Estonia still included some peanuts and raisins, but they are far too sweet. I think it's because they feel they need to fill a bigger glass that they wind up diluting the nice wine flavor into a slightly spiked juice.

Tallinn Santa Market

When I visited my brother in Holland some time ago, there was a big "Sinter" - or "Christmas" - market going on in Maastricht, where he was studying. Since then we've jokingly referred to all things Christmas as "Sintery." Sinter cookies, Sinter eve, Sinter caroling, etc... Rebecca changed the word to "Santa" for comic effect. So, when we came face to face with Tallinn's Christmas market, in the Raekoja plats, it was dubbed "Santa market." The name stuck because Rebecca insisted that we call it that.
It's one of the best in Europe, according to the city website. There were blood sausages and potatoes frying all through the day and many Hoogvein (mulled wine, or Glögg) stands, so the air was nicely perfumed and the snow was splashed a shocking pink.
There were some great handicraft stores and some touristy, gimmicky stands. This one, above, was a favorite because of the baby booties.

This is a pretty good representation of how Tallinn women look - lots of fur, high boots, some leg showing in between, near an ATM.
There were plenty of tourists, but also a lot of locals passing through. The town hall square is very central, so we walked through many times on our way from place to place.
At night, bands and DJ's took over a small stage on one side. Sometimes they played Christmas music, sometimes they blasted Rihanna and Baltic dubstep. The tree was pretty, even when the music echoed tinnily up the narrow passages around the square.
Other than Glögg, we never bought anything at the market. It was too crowded most of the time to stop for long, and the snow was packed to a hard, slippery sheen. The Santa market was endearing, though, and we were a little sad to leave it behind.

Happy Hanukkah!

So, no one in Latvia celebrates Hanukkah. I know, shocking. But it still struck me as sort of sad not to see any blue incorporated into town Christmas displays and not to see any electric menorahs or cardboard dreidels. Today, I noticed these cookies mixed in with ones shaped like bells and snowflakes at the supermarket. It was one of those pay-by-weight situations, so naturally, I picked through the mix to fill my bag solely with stars. It was my little way of celebrating.

Oh, Christmas Tree

A young man at an outdoors store told us that the town bowling alley was no longer, the woman at the Valmiera Dance Theater box office told us that there was nothing playing until Sunday, the movie theater was playing 'Harjis Poters.' So, we went to the Tourist Info center for a suggestion. "There's the Christmas Tree lighting tonight," the teenager there offered with an unenthusiastic shrug. "It's not very long but...." Yes! Yes! We'll take it! 'Not very long,' sounded perfect on such a cold day.
At 5pm, the start time we were given for the lighting, it was already pitch black and people had really started to show up. The attendees were basically split in half, one group around the tree and one, across the lawn, around the little stage that was set up against the Valmiera Cultural Center. A group of school children in Santa hats sang carols and a table sold light-up pinwheels and gingerbread cookies. We kept our sites on the tree, though, wanting to catch the moment it lit on video. About ten minutes of recorded carols followed and then, finally, a man came up to the microphone to speak. "The mayor! The mayor!" we thought and got ready for a countdown.

Turns out, he was just introducing the next act. Latvia has a long folk singing tradition, so it was no wonder that a merry band of costumed, tambourine-playing singers took the stage. Comfortable taking our eyes off the tree for the moment, we watched as their farm animal costumes made shadows against the building and they switched from song to skit, all in Latvian. It was beginning to get very, very cold and even the little kids that wrestled in the snow around us seemed to be running out of steam. Then, the matriarch songstress began to shout something and we thought, "A countdown!" Turn, point, click on..... and then the singing started again.
Things went like this until something was said that made the crowd around the stage make their way across to the tree. They all dashed by us, mostly children, their parents, grandparents, great grandparents (people have children really young here) and a few ironic teenagers. It couldn't have happened at a better time, because our left and right feet, respectively, were beginning to hurt with frozenness. We had just begun to walk away when the crowd shift began and we scurried back to our spot in the snow waiting for our cue.
Of course, our cue was in Latvian. So, we missed it. It didn't sound like a countdown, but rather a chant by the folk singers. Honestly, it seemed a little anticlimactic, but hey- you can't have Boyz II Men lip syncing 'Silent Night' at every Christmas tree lighting. We still felt tickled by our luck, being there in what some may call the Rockefeller Center of the Vidzeme Region of Latvia on the night of the Christmas Tree lighting.

Thanksgiving Abroad

Merlin: This was our Thanksgiving morning - a few inches of snow on the ground and more in the air. We are in Riga, the beautiful capital of Latvia, and this picture was taken at eight thirty a.m. We are at 56° 57' north, so it takes a while for the sun to come up.

Rebecca: For all those who have no idea what that means (which included myself until Merlin explained it), New York City is at 40° 47' north and from the equator to the North Pole is 90 degrees. So, yeah. We're quite a bit higher up here than at home. It's funny, because just ten days ago, on a particularly hot day in Lithuania, I remember saying "You know, Thanksgiving has been this early some years and I remember it snowing when I was a kid." And then it did.
Merlin: We went to the central market to gather ingredients. It's a very big place - acres and acres of stalls, some inside, some out in the snow. I felt bad for the people who were standing in the cold with running noses, trying to keep the flakes from piling up on their apples and persimmons.

Rebecca: We were going to get some cranberries, but opted instead for currants, which we had been seeing around markets since Poland. We figured it would be a good regional play on tradition - and that they would take less time to cook.
Merlin: We were able to get everything that we needed before lunchtime. We could even have bought a turkey, but that seemed a little excessive for one person (Rebecca doesn't eat meat). One of the more difficult things about shopping at these markets is that its hard to tell which of the dozens of identical stalls sells the best meat, dairy, produce, etc. I chose between the six or eight chicken-specializing places (as opposed to the pork or beef butchers, or the stalls with smoked ducks and turkey legs) based on the size of the birds that they offered. When I picked a chicken that looked right the woman held it up for me to inspect and urged me to smell it. It smelled perfectly fine, so I took it.

Rebecca: That's our lunch above, from a little shop in the market. They had a few shelves behind a window with bowls and plates showing what they offered, which was helpful on our second day in Latvia, not yet knowing what the words for anything are. I chose a soup that I suspected had a little meat, (which, thankfully, wound up being bits of mushroom) and Merlin chose a sausage plate with mashed potatoes and some strips of raw squash. Any American knows that calculating when and what to eat before Thanksgiving dinner is tricky but important. We felt good about our early afternoon plates of food. Not too much. Not too little. Definitely Latvian.
Rebecca: We picked up the brown bread on Wednesday night, seeing it in a bakery and not wanting to pass up its wonderful seed-and-nuttiness. Merlin correctly reasoned that it may be too dense for a stuffing, so we bought this light wheat country bread at the market. Our stuffing was mostly that bread with accents of the darker variety. This is our very first Thanksgiving where we were solely responsible for our own meal. So, we wanted the stuffing to be awesome (and vaguely European).

Merlin: Another thing about shopping for food: it was so nice to be able to go shopping on Thanksgiving morning and not feel like we were entering some kind of war zone.
Merlin: I made a sauce with the red currants, but we also put some in the stuffing. I mixed them in with the sauteing onions and celery so that they would soften up a little. The sauce was made by cooking the currants in a little water with honey for half and hour, until they had begun to break down. I mixed in half a shredded, cooked beet (I know, I know... shredded beet again!) and a little salt. The mixture was so powerfully red that I had visions of the pink bathtub ring in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," which stains everything in the house.

Rebecca: It was our "cranberry sauce" sans cranberry.

Rebecca: And here is our table! Please ignore the plates. They were really ugly, but being as they came with the apartment we rented (for the specific purpose of having an oven on Thanksgiving) we didn't care too much. There's the sauce, the stuffing (which also had a good amount of mushroom and was delicious), Merlin's chicken, the potato, carrot and onion roasted with the chicken mushed up into a brighter play on mashed potatoes and a big bowl of sauteed veggies (shredded brussels sprouts, spinach, onion, apple and pumpkin seeds).

Merlin: Also, about a quarter cup of gravy. Everything was good, and we had great leftovers too. As a consequence, we really haven't eaten much outside our home.Merlin: Here's Rebecca's first plate of food. She took a little bit of chicken, which was a generous gesture.

Rebecca: Every year, I wind up sneaking into my mom's kitchen for some turkey skin. So, Merlin repaid my nugget-of-flesh generosity by allowing me to take any and all the bird skin I wanted. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving. We both got to call our parents (Skype), hole up, cook, tell each other over and over again just how thankful we are and then...

Merlin: ...we watched football, illegally, over the internet. It was almost like we were home in America, except that we were drinking Lāčplēsis Dižalus beer.

It's Too Early for Christmas (So, how about those fruit vendors...?)

When we arrived in Kaunas, we saw the very first signs of Christmas market set-up. On November 15th. See, Europe doesn't have Thanksgiving, so there's really nothing to stop people from jumping headlong into Christmas as soon as November begins. The white, cobweb-looking light structure at the left of the building will soon sell wooden toys, hot wine and angels made of every material imaginable.
There's no doubt that these two little girls are very excited about ole Santa coming to town, but I just can't let myself get in the spirit just yet. It's too early. So, let's switch subjects.
These standalone produce kiosks reminded me of home. While candy, soda, magazine, cigarette stands have been around in almost every European city we've been to so far, these were the first fruit-and-vegetable stands where you could - say- grab an apple on the way to work.
Here's another one of the stands. You know this kid is staring off into the distance towards the Christmas lights....
Once you're done with your piece of fruit (or candy bar, if you've opted for the crap kiosk) you get to discard your core, peel, wrapper into one of these awesomely camoflouged trash receptacles. They are about as tall as a curb and have these removable metal containers that extend down into the ground. At least, I figure that's how it works, there being a little handle and all. They're perfect for the person who wants to feel the evil thrill of polluting. Go ahead, throw that balled up receipt on the ground. Just aim for the hole.

Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints Day)

All Saints Day is also Day of the Dead In Poland, it's a national holiday. Yesterday, the first of November, we were in the countryside outside Krakow and experienced a little bit of it.We knew that it was a big deal - our friend Piotr told us about it - but we had thought that it was going to be centered around a few religious sites, or in a few towns. We didn't realize that we were going to see hordes of people near every cemetery. There were makeshift parking lots set up along roadsides, scores of candle and flower vendors. We had to slow down in every town, people were clogging the roads. As it got closer to dusk, and we were heading home for the day, the crowds began to dissipate a little. We were able to find a spot to park in the town of Chrobrego and we walked down to the village graveyard.
There were still a lot of people there, and most graves were covered with candles and flowers. It was a semi-somber gathering of people. The clothes were clearly "sunday best," and voices were hushed - but people were smiling to each other and seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Some graves were more decorated than others. People travel long distances, we've heard, to visit the graves of relatives and many make journeys to more than one cemetery. They place candles on the graves so that the spirits of the dead can make their way through the night.
The candles were beautiful, especially as the sun set. The whole place was lit up, the bouquets were illuminated in strange ways and the breeze began to die down. As we were leaving, it was almost silent.
Daylight savings time happens earlier here, and it has been getting dark very suddenly. Driving home we passed a few more graveyards, all of them lit up, the candles very bright amongst the stones and trees. It was a surreal, beautiful experience.