Martisor: The End of Winter? Questionable.

Tomorrow, March 1^st, marks a holiday in Moldova and Romania known as “Martisor.” The idea is to celebrate spring and the rebirth of life after a hard winter but it’s still looking like winter out there right now. It felt more like spring a few weeks ago. At any rate, vendors have been selling Martisor pins on the street for a while now. They come in lots of different shapes and sizes but always have the colors red and white. My Romanian teacher explained to me one of the legends of Martisor which is, in short, that the evil winter witch puts up a fight with the beautiful lady Spring because he always wants to stick around longer. The winter guy cuts Spring and her warm red blood falls on the fresh white snow. The snow starts to melt from this drop of blood and soon Spring has taken over. That’s the gist of it. This website has more info.

http://www.marisha.net/martisor.htm

In other news, the weekend was once again very eventful and I’ll give a couple highlights. On Friday night I went to a concert at a very beautiful theater in the center of Chisinau. The Moldovan folklore orchestra was accompanying contest entrants who were singing Romances in Romanian. The music was pretty good, but the outfits the women were wearing were just out of this world. Any description I give can’t really do them justice, but I’ll say at least that one lady who was probably in her 50s was wearing a floor-length red dress that was all sequins and sparkle. Almost blindingly bright. Another dress looked like something that would cover an Easter basket. I think that’s how Melissa described it. It was pale yellow and just kind of full and fluffy and sheer looking. There were some pastel flowers up top if I remember correctly too. I wish I’d had my camera.

I also went to the Malina Cocktail House a couple of times this weekend. It’s my new favorite place in Chisinau. It’s pretty small and set inside this bridge that’s connected to one of the shopping centers so you look out over the street. It’s nice and warm inside with pink lighting and raspberries everywhere (because of the name) and there’s a faint scent of hookah. Very relaxing atmosphere, except of course there is house/electronic music pumping constantly because, hey, we're in Eastern Europe after all. I like it though.