Church Picnic

The "road" to the cabin

The cabin

Enjoying some watermelon

Getting the meat ready. It smelled so gooood!

Feasting

Saturday our church met up together and went out of town for a picnic. Here is the story for you to enjoy!

A little after 9 am on Saturday morning I leave my apartment to meet up with some friends and carpool to the picnic site. Thankfully I am not driving so I head over to the bus stop to wait. I wait and I wait. About 20 minutes later I am picked up. We then head down the block to pick up another girl and we head off to our meeting site. In the heart of town we stop at a main metro stop to meet up with the other cars and pick more people up. We arrive at 10 am on the dot, our meeting time. I go into a store to look around because I know how punctual Russians are. I come out 10 minutes later to find another car has arrived. Still we are waiting. We wait and wait. Finally at 10:45 we head down the road for our picnic. We drive maybe 20 minutes and then pull over for gas and a potty brake. Yes, just 20 minutes down the road. After about 10 minutes we are back on the road. We drive another 20 minutes or so and then pull over while one car goes and buys the food. Thats right. We are going on a picnic and have no food. After 40 minutes of sitting in a hot stuffy car we are on the road again. This time we go 5 minutes down the road before stoping for more food.

By now even the Russians are getting irritated. Two women in our car decide to go buy a watermelon and two other melons. They make it back to the car in plenty of time. We still wait another 10 minutes. Down the road we go for 5 more minutes before we stop again. Now we must wait for the person who owns the cabin we are going to. We stand around for 10 minutes before we decided to just go there without them. We head down a dirt road for quite some time when finally to our relief we hit pavement and start seeing houses. That only lasts for about 1 kilometer before we hit a worse dirt road with no home in sight. I can't remember how long we were on the dirt road when we finally stopped and headed into a field. Slowly we inched our way through a field when finally we found the cabin just after 1 pm.

We get out of are cars to stretch and now we must wait again. We wait for the owner to arrive, we wait for a table to be made, we wait for the coals to heat up, we wait for the meat to be cooked. During all of this waiting we are eating watermelon, playing games, talking, and picking mushrooms. Finally at 3:30 we eat! A picnic never tasted so good!