Health and Safety

Local style.

It was the culmination of Maslenitsa on Sunday (the week before 'Great Lent' (the 7 weeks before Orthodox Easter). Rather than just a day for eating pancakes they have a whole week and there were carnavals, music and stand after stand selling blinis.
During Lent meat, fish and dairy are forbidden (hence the week long blini eating fest before hand). If you look in Wikipedia it also says that parties, secular music, dancing and 'other distractions from the spiritual life' are forbidden during Lent. Given the events this week it would seem that not everyone is as religious as they maybe portray.

There were also a range of traditional games that you could play - a kind of hockey with wooden sticks made out of branches, stilts, a games that resembled bowling and a games where each person had a soft (isn) baton and proceeded to hit the other person with it. Then there was the 'game' that had caught Luca's eye.

"Look, they've got real swords!" he said in amazement - even he couldn't believe it.

Sure enough children were queueing up to slice apples and cabbages in half with 'real swords'.

Of course he had a go and thankfully he cut through the apple in one go (there was intense parent rivalry going on) but then they started throwing apples for him to slice through the air. We left at that point. It's one thing a six year old cutting through an apple on a stump, it's quite another him wafting the sword around head height.

The blinis were nice though!