The venue for this activity was a little ways away from the dorms we were staying at. To get to the building the ball was being held at we had to take the subway, walk through a little suburb type area and then through a park. The ball was in a building kind of in the middle of nowhere all by itself. The normal building was under reconstruction or restoration, so they were holding it here. We had a few extra people join our group in order to make a participant requirement. We started by having to take our shoes off and put on these thin flat shoes. Then the boys and girls were separated to get their outfits on. The girls were taken into a room with racks of poofy dresses. We had to put on the hoop skirt and all. Then the ladies that worked there assessed our dress sizes by looking at us and pointing us in a direction. Once we picked out our dresses and were zipped in, we got gloves and head accessories.

The dressing up was easily the best part. We were then led downstairs again to the ballroom where we took so many pictures. It’s not every day that you get to dress up in ball gowns! Once the boys joined us in their costumes, our instructor joined us. He did not speak English, so this woman had to translate for us, but he was very passionate about the dancing and customs.

He taught us three or four different dances and they ranged from very slow and simple to fast paced and more complex like the polka. It was a ton of fun. We had to switch partners and go around in a big circle. Then we learned the language of the fans. Different fan colors as well as different gestures have different meanings. Some of the gestures include twirling it, putting it over certain body parts, and holding it in different hands. It is a rather complex system for having a fan be the only thing that conveys meaning. Then all of the ladies in the group got white fans and we learned dances where we used the fans as props, it was also really hot in that room, so we did use the fans as fans. After we finished learning all of the dances, we took more photos and then the boys and girls went our separate ways to change back into our normal clothes.

Reference for photo – www.fancircleinternational.org

Overall I thought this experience was amazing. This activity was so cool and unlike anything I have ever done and probably will do again. Dressing up in the ballgowns was so cool and it was so interesting to have to wear a dress that big and have to be so aware of your surroundings. That wasn’t something that I had ever considered before. Learning the dances was very interesting and finding out that there is a fan language. I would definitely recommend this for anyone going to Saint Petersburg. It was just very unique and the people that worked there seemed to really love their jobs and they seemed to be incredibly knowledgeable about all of that stuff. It was just such an awesome experience and I cannot stress that enough.

Refernces

http://www.angelpig.net/victorian/fanlanguage.html

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/tag/language-of-the-fan/

The day started early in the morning. We had to take the subway to get to the train. The train ride itself was about an hour, but there were some cool things to see. There was tons of graffiti art on the walls surrounding the railroad tracks and this man who played the harmonica was walking around.  Once we got off the train at the station, it was very apparent that we were no longer in the city. There was lots of green space. We arrived at a church that sat outside of the train station. The church was surrounded by lilac bushes and pigeons. After we looked around at the church for a few minutes, we had about a fifteen minute walk through the rows of dachas.

Masha’s family’s dacha was huge. There were like three or four buildings on the property and tons of space for planting stuff. When we arrived, we were greeted by Masha’s family – her mom, dad, and son. The first activity we did was to make borscht, both with meat and vegetarian and we got a mini tour of the main house. It had a few bedrooms and lots of family heirlooms.  After the borscht was finished cooking and we ate, we played a trivia game with a ball where we could win chocolate.  Then we painted our own matryoshka dolls! This, in my opinion, was the highlight of the day. They all turned out so good and everyone’s dolls looked so different and creative! We probably spent at least an hour doing it.

Next we made our dinner. It was pelmeni, both with meat and vegetarian again, and this lemon chicken, called shashlik in Russian, that was made over a little fire. I was pretty skeptical about this chicken, but it turned out to be amazing. It had some onions and a little bit of garlic. We were all so hungry by the time dinner was ready, that we ate almost everything. Then Masha tried to get us to sing some songs in Russian while her dad played the accordion. The lyrics jumped around, but that was still an experience.

After dinner, we started playing some games that I am pretty sure Masha made up. It was like charades with a jump rope and teams. It was pretty weird, but I was pleasantly surprised at how long we could jump rope as a team. Then we had to learn these “dances.” I put that in quotes because I am also semi-sure that Masha made them up. They were pretty fun but they were pretty fast and I struggled with them just a tad.

By this time it started getting dark and the bugs were getting way worse. We had been plagued with mosquitoes all day and we tried using bug spray to no avail.  The sun was starting to get lower and the bugs were really coming out. The hosts made us tea and had some candy on the table. We kind of had to speed through that because it was starting to get late and we had to catch our train. They ended up driving us back to the station just because we were running out of time, which was very nice of them, especially because of the bugs. We finally made it to that station and got back on our train. By the time we made it to the station we were all exhausted.

The dacha was really fun overall and the food was really good. They said that all of the produce was from their gardens which is really cool. Painting the dolls was definitely the best part of the day. It was nice to have a chill day where we didn’t have to do too much stuff. I really liked this experience.