Easter Saturday

Wow, had a reaaaally nice Easter Saturday today. I was invited to my buddy, Stefan's family home for Easter Saturday. When I was walking to his place, I was delightfully amused that people were walking around on the streets carrying little baskets of eggs, flowers, bread, some simple little baskets, some lavishly decorated. I know the Poles keep a lot of traditions but really seeing it happening, people out on the street, carrying out these traditions is another thing!

After arriving at Stefan's place, we walked to the local church (this little Baroque style church) to get our little basket of eggs blessed! Yesterday was supposed to be fasting and the food needs to be blessed before we can eat again today. In the olden days, people put all sorts in the baskets: ham, bread... all the food they'll eat but thankfully these days usually just put eggs in basket just as a symbol. There were heaps of people on the street, walking from and to the church, everyone goes to get their food blessed even if they're not Catholic apparently. So we entered the jam packed church and the priest said some blessing or something and then the fun begins when he walked around, carrying a mini-broom-looking thing and started "blessing" us/our baskets with water. Oh the look of glee on his face! He was having sooo much fun getting us wet :)

So, with our eggs all blessed, we checked out a few other churches/cathedrals and proceeded back home for "Pre-Easter Lunch". We started with this yummmm as zurek soup with the blessed eggs, homemade chicken+pork pate, salad, then had roast pork with plum stuffed inside, these Polish dumplings, beetroot salad, all very traditional sort of Easter food. Dessert was this "bebe" (not sure if I spelt it correctly) which translates as 'Old Woman', triple layered cake, poppy seed cake and MY homemade Afghan cookies ;) And of course along with this Cranberry vodka... mmMMmmm

After stuffing ourselves silly, we went out, drove to Sleza, the closest mountain to Wroclaw (It feels soooo luxurious being in a car btw!). We had a really nice walk up to the top of the mountain with a beautiful view at the end. I really enjoyed being up on the mountain, seeing some green scenery, fresh air and reminded me of tramping back home.

We got back to Stefan's place, more food (cold food for supper) including this really nice chicken meat/veges in jelly (gelatine)! We tried to finish more of the food from lunch and just sat at the dining table and chatted over tea. Stefan's parents are sooooo nice! They didn't know much English and with my even more limited Polish, we still somehow managed to have really interesting conversations - with Stefan translating back and forth. They were really curious about New Zealand and just pictures it as paradise (which I don't refute).

Today's definitely one of the highlights of my time here!
Easter Sunday tomorrow at Marshall's home - yay! :)