This holiday we've got covered

I promise not every post is going to be about holidays, but Russia's pretty big on them, so here we go again: This past Friday, June 23, Saint Petersburg celebrated Алые Паруса (pronounced Alia Parusa. A sidenote: I can switch my keyboard to Cyrillic! An addendum to the sidenote: Typing is Cyrillic is really hard. Like really hard. Like it took me several minutes to type Алые Паруса, but only two seconds to accidentally delete when I tried to copy and paste it onto this line. Anyway.) Алые Паруса happens every year on the day all of the high school seniors in Russia finish their last exam. Recall, in the good ol' days of Soviet Russia, that Stalin claimed to be able to tell you exactly what page in the textbook all the kids were studying on any given day? Many things have grown less extreme is Russia since the collapse of the USSR (the national dress code, for instance. But that is an opinion for another post), but the educational system isn't really one of them. Every high school student still does the same program, and thus all of the high school students in Saint Petersburg graduate on the same day. Hence Алые Раруса--I'm not sure if it's nationwide, but the entire city of Petersburg celebrated the high school graduates.

Now, recall once more way back to my previous post when I quizzically discussed the Russian apathy towards День России. (Сyrillics! Good lord, I'm cool.) I've developed a new theory on the reason why nobody does much about that one: they're all saving themselves for Алые Паруса. The best way that I can describe Алые Паруса is as an holiday with the sentiment of prom, the hoopla of the 4th of July, and the generalized blood-alcohol level of Woodstock. If you're under the age of 30 and you aren't out of the street drinking and partying until 7 am the next morning, you a) have two broken legs and no one who likes you enough to push your wheelchair around all night or b) are legally dead. There are concerts in several different corners of the city (note: only bad music, which is good, because good music would be expensive to book, and most Russians seek to be too drunk to care by about 10 pm anyways), fireworks over the Neva (although they were the most polite, elegant, and restrained fireworks I have ever witnessed), and throngs and throngs and throngs of people.

The Алые Паруса itself is the name of a ship with red sails that sets forth on the Neva at around 1:30 am. I say around, because everything in Russia happens in RST (Russian Standard Time), which is approximately equivalent to JST (Jewish Standard Time) and almost as bad as CST (College Standard Time). So, the fireworks started around 1:50, with an amazing fountainy watery showy thing, and the ship came out at about 2:10 or so. Again, I think the Russians were too drunk to notice. Did I mention the drinking? There was a lot of drinking. As in, most of the local stores ran out of alcohol (common policy was clearly to stock up early--most people walked around carrying 4 or 5 beers by 9:30 pm or so). The fact that this is the height of the white nights made the evening-night-morning especially wonderful. It never really got totally dark, except for about the 45 minutes of fireworks, when it was maybe 8 pm-U.S. quality darkness (i.e., dark enough). It was also much easier to stay out all night when my body thought that it was only early evening most of the time.

As for the legend behind the Алые Паруса, the way my friend told it to me was that way back when, a young girl fell in love with an average sailor. She then went to a fortune teller, who told her that she would marry a man who sailed a ship with red sails. Then she was sad, for her sailor sailed a ship with boringly beige sails. However, he decided one day that it would be really impressive to equip his ship with red sails. I'm not sure why, but maybe it was all the rage with the ladies. Anywho, he did so, and she was suitably impressed, and then they got married. To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what this has to do with high school graduation, except that most of the girls would probably be considered eligible for marriage at this point, so this holiday may have sinister undertones that I missed because people were shouting a lot and it was generally a pretty loud, raucous, crazy time in St. Petersburg that night.

Fun linguistical note: My new favorite word is Russian is брак (brak), which has two meanings: 1) Marriage. 2) Spoiled goods. Russia, I salute you.