Bunny days

Sorry I missed last week. It was my birthday on Thursday, so Wednesday was spent hunting down groceries and preparing some of the foodstuff, before unexpectedly being invited to a barbecue by one of our neighbours. Thursday was spent at uni, preparing most of the dinner, and then obviously eating/drinking/playing games. We would've gone out, but thanks to some lovely laws from the fifties, public events involving dancing aren't allowed during certain public holidays (including Good Friday). It was nice though, just would've been nicer with dancing rather than with growing irritation about outdated laws forcing a religion down my throat. I don't particularly mind having bank holidays on important Christian holidays, as long as people of other religions have the right to take days off on their holidays as well. It's nice to have a day off every once in a while, for whatever reason, but I'll bloody well dance whenever I want to. It's not like clubs being open would interfere with church services, or in fact anyone's life except those who work there and those who choose to go there.

As for the actual Easter days... Sunday we decided to be fancy and went out for brunch xD. The food was so-so, but there are worse things than sitting in the sun for a few hours with cold beer infinite food (including roast lamb (nomnom); I might be almost vegetarian, but darn, cute little baby animals are tasty). Somehow we ended up spending the rest of the day playing cards in our garden. Monday there was more barbecuing, and more cold drinks, and more cards. One of my roomie's friends brought her pet rabbit to explore our garden and its rabbitness, since it had never been outside before and seemed to be rather confused by all the green stuff at first xD. So all in all a nice holiday, despite the lack of dancing on my birthday (and the hangover on Friday, and the cleaning on Saturday...). Oddly enough more than we've ever done on Easter at my parents place, where it usually consisted of a nice breakfast and maybe dinner with my grandma on Easter Sunday (and hidden chocolate eggs, of course, when we were little).

Although I don't really partake in holiday traditions, I think they are rather interesting in their “oddness”. Or rather, that everyone seems to take their traditions as normal, no matter how wacky, but immediately crack up about equally weird traditions from elsewhere. The Slovak kids I worked with thought the whole egg-laying bunny thing was hilarious and kept on asking whether German kids were really stupid enough to believe that, only to burst out laughing when I said yeah, well, sorta, the little ones. On the other hand Slovak Easter traditions seem incredibly weird to outsiders as well. The short version: Men beat women and throw buckets of water at them and then get a small present in return (a painted egg, or some chocolate, or some booze, depending on their age). Traditionally it's supposed to bring purity & fertility to the women, but if you don't know that (or only get the condensed version) it sounds rather cruel, misogynist and nonsensical. In reality most people stick to the water part, and it's a lot of fun for all involved (especially the kids), although it does make it rather dangerous to go out for a woman (at least without a second set of clothes) ;) My French predecessor apparently hadn't been informed about Slovak Easter traditions and got a rather nice pelting with water balloons. I tried to avoid it by staying put, but of course some of my Slovak friends felt they had to introduce the German girl to Slovak Easter xD

I like the idea of rituals as such. The idea that some apparently random, nonsensical thing can be invested with meaning. We all partake in rituals, they all make equally little, and equally much, sense. AJ Jacobs puts it quite well, pointing out that if an alien came to earth and witnessed one person blowing out a birthday candle, and a second one avoiding to wear clothes of mixed fibres, it would hardly say “This one makes sense, but that one, that one's just crazy.”