Weekend à la Russe

It’s Sunday evening and the weekend is almost over, but - good news! – in 5 days there will be another one. So, how do Russians spend their weekends in summer?
 

Unless there are some plans in the city or special plans to travel to another place, most people leave the city (or town) to go to their dachas (if they are originally from the city) or to the place they are from (if they were born in one place and work in another).

Dacha is a summerhouse. Most dachas are located in dacha communities (where people do not live all year round, but just go on weekends or for the whole summer), others are in villages (where apart from dachas there are local people who live there all the time).

Flowers and herbs from the dacha

In summer the Russians like to spend their weekend fishing, going to forests to pick berries or mushrooms, going with friends and family to a picnic with shashlik (barbecue) by the river, enjoying the nature and the weather.

 We do not go to pick mushrooms/berries just because we want to eat them – you can always buy them during the season. But it is such a pleasure to wake up on the weekend, to put on something baggy and military-style (there are lots of mosquitos in our forests, so wearing such clothes you will not only be scary-looking, but also a hard nut to crack for them) and to go to the forest, breathe that smell, enjoy that beauty, look for the berries/mushrooms, sometimes for quite a time before you find the first one, make a competition with your companion who brings more of them home. After 4 or 5 hours you leave the forest, stop by the river on your way to swim and then come home, tired but extremely happy. You have lunch with the perfectly fried potatoes with mushrooms, then go to banya (Russian sauna) to relax.

In fact, the process of picking berries is very healthy: you make not less than 20 000 steps and you have to make squats hundreds of times for every berry (if it is wild strawberry, for example), so it is not only pleasure but also kind of sport. And aside from burned calories you breath in the smell of summer ecologically-friendly forest and then you enjoy the taste of the berries, which are so rich in vitamins and microelements.

 

Another Russian “sport” for the weekend is fishing. Well, this process is not that healthy – you have to sit on the river side for a long time (alone or together with a group of friends) and you have to drink lots of beer. It is OK if after fishing for some hours you come home without a fish (it is not the result, but the process that matters, same as with going to the forest). 

Fishing is for men, this is why I can not tell you much about that. They say in Russia that a woman at the fishing party is bad luck: you will not hook a single fish. And I want to bring luck, not bad luck. So I’d better meet you after the fishing with buckets full of water (this is of good omen in Russia :)

Russian village