New Year's Eve, 2011

Our landlord and landlady invited us over for New Year’s Eve. We arrived around 10:40 and got settled in for the Russian president’s address on TV. When he finished, we toasted Russia and the year ahead for all its residents. Then we began dinner, stopping before midnight to watch the Belarusian president’s address. We raised toasts to Belarus, to friendship, to learning, and to several other things. Alla was drinking “Sovietsky Champagne,” Anna Adamovna was drinking home-made Hungarian wine, Evgeny Ivanovich was drinking whiskey and I was drinking a cocktail which I will describe later.


At some point in the evening we moved onto dessert. I also remember that we toasted Germany and German engineering when 1:00 rolled around in Minsk. And we watched a whole lot of TV. Our hosts surfed the channels to keep a steady stream going of popular (and generally old) Russian musicians lip-synching their songs, dancing, and showing us their possibly-augmented profiles. We heard a lot of fireworks outside, but our hosts’ apartment is situated such that we couldn’t see anything. Come to think of it, I still hear a lot of fireworks, and the new year is nearly 24 hours old. Celebrations run strong here.

At 2:00 a.m. we toasted England and I sent my best friend there a congratulatory text message. (Apparently Rich was asleep, however, because he didn’t reply until today.) By this time Evgeny was pouring himself really small glasses of whiskey and Alla was maintaining that her champagne was a non-alcoholic sham. I was enjoying my cocktails greatly, and would love to have the recipe. Unfortunately, I think I’ll never know its subtleties. It included equal parts birch juice tapped and harvested by Anna Adamovna, and two fruit compotes which she also made. Each of the beverages was good on its own, and the plum compote tasted a lot like the preserved plums she served so I’m pretty comfortable about how to go about making that compote. On the other hand, the apple compote (which they called apple juice) was redder than any apple juice I’ve ever seen. Generally, I believe compotes are simply fruit boiled with water and sugar, but I don’t know what kind of apples have that much red pigment. Anyway, it was good, and we now know that I was the only one actually drinking non-alcoholic beverages.

Our hosts really wanted us to go to the National Library to see the shows and hear the music, but I didn’t want to stay up any later and jeopardize my adjustment to the new time zone. Besides, they only wanted us to go there. They were apparently more or less ready for bed too. Not knowing anybody in the next few time zones, then, we went home and went to bed.

I, for one, felt fine in the morning.