Baba Yaga etc.

I’ve had to muster up the motivation to do this blog, because I honestly don’t know how to put a lot of things that happen here into words.   So we’ll just go with whatever spills out from my brain onto this virtual page. 



Leshi



The one and only place I can begin has to be the day trip we went on last Sunday.  Our friend Svetlana arranged the opportunity for us to visit ‘Baba Yaga’.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with old Babz Yagz, this is what Wikipedia has to say about her:

"In Russian tales, Baba Yaga is portrayed as a hag who flies through the air in a mortar, using the pestle as a rudder and sweeping away the tracks behind her with a broom made of silver birch. She lives in a log cabin that either moves around on a pair of dancing chicken legs, is surrounded by a palisade with a skull on each pole, or both. The keyhole to her front door is a mouth filled with sharp teeth; the fence outside is made with human bones with skulls on top, often with one pole lacking its skull, leaving space for the hero or heroes."

So, we took a 2 ½ journey on a minibus to Kukoboy, which is the birth place of Baba Yaga and is on the Yaroslavl border.  The journey itself was good, because it’s actually quite fun feeling like you can count the seconds you are in the air when the bus flies over potholes and generally non-surfaced roads.  It’s amazing driving past all these dilapidated shacks, old houses and roads lined with forests.  As we got closer to Kukoboy, we realised how far out this place was.  With no phone signal and nobody for miles around, I was genuinely wondering who would rescue us if the bus turned over.  But luckily we didn’t have to deal with that eventuality, and we pulled up at the place. 

As per usual, I have a toilet story to report.   Basically I will never complain about the state of a toilet ever again.  Even the one in my apartment which often has a nice tray of cat poo waiting for a lucky guest.  Kukoboy hasn’t reached the era of the flushing toilet yet, so we were faced with a stinking hole in a wooden shack.   As funny as I will find this experience for years to come,  at the time I was conjuring up scenarios in my head of me slipping in my wellies and getting a leg stuck down this pit.  I’m not even going to get started on the smell. 

Anyway, back to the actual point.   We got to meet Baba Yaga and also Leshi the tree spirit.  Absolutely terrifying.  This whole thing is targeted towards to children.  Russian kids clearly have a different horror threshold, because they were loving it.  So these two people dressed up as a tree spirit and a hag were jumping around talking into microphones.  Had no idea what they were saying, so just found myself sitting and praying that they didn’t include me in their audience interaction.  The whole thing was so surreal, but brilliant at the same time because I just couldn’t really believe what I was seeing.  It’s quite frustrating  trying to explain because if you weren’t there, there is no way you can possibly fully understand how nuts it was. 

So to cut a very long story slightly shorter, we stood outside and listened  to Baba Yaga talk from her hut.  Things only got progressively weirder, when they made us stand in a circle, hold hands and dance.   Then they decided to swing beanbags on ropes at our faces and then made us jump over them.  The entire trip would have been a health and safety scandal in the UK.  Love it!  The grand finale was when Baba Yaga took a liking to our very own George, kissed him, made him wear a beard and dance with her in the middle of the circle.  To set the scene a little more accurately, take all of the above and set it to techno dance music blasting out in a forest. 

SO that’s the gist of the trip.  It was so much fun and something I will never forget for comedy’s sake.  In other news, the snow seems to be on its way.  I think it’s forecast for the beginning of October.  I’ve eaten some more classic things like onion and egg pies, cabbage soup and pizza made from cake and egg.  We went to a traditional Russian restaurant which was nice, but the Russians have a completely different idea of customer service.  I waited about an hour for a glass of apple juice, and the food always take so long! But it was quite nice anyway. 

I’m having such a good time actually.  Starting to understand things a bit better language wise and also just love the fact that I’m in RUSSIA!  I feel like a microscopic dot in this enormous country, but there’s just something about it that I really like.  Will have been here for a month on Sunday! Everyone is heading back to uni now, so hope you all have a really good time being back!

xxx