Moscow's Christmas in January

My side-gig these days is as a short term consultant for the World Bank to assist the Eurasian Center for Food Security in Moscow, Russia. The World Bank and ECFS hire researchers to produce case studies about food security in Eastern Europe/Western Asia. I came out in Nov 2016 to help the first cohort of case study authors learn how to adapt their case studies so they could be used by teachers and demonstrate to interested faculty and students at Moscow State University how to teach with case studies. I gave a couple presentations that were very well received, but didn't hear anything else about it for a long time. 

In 2019 the World Bank asked if I would grab a colleague (Jim Gentry!) to run a week-long all-day intensive training program for professors in the area to learn how to teach using case studies. It was a wonderful experience, and it occurred to me this week (for reasons that will become clear in a future post) that I never blogged about that wonderful experience.

So I spent the last week of January in Moscow! Russia celebrates Christmas later than we do, on January 7 (blame the Gregorian/Julian calendar switch). That meant the Christmas decorations were still up when we were there. Here are some pictures and videos of Christmas in Moscow:

Along the massive divided roads are islands filled with houses or tunnels filled with lights.

To celebrate the new year of 2020 they also had major street displays like this one. It's worth zooming on the delicate wood cutouts inside the 0.

There are very large Christmas trees on many of the major street corners, like this one in front of the Lenin museum. (I'll take irony for $300, Alex).

Santa Claus (aka Ded Moroz, or Grandfather Frost) doesn't use elves and reindeer in Russia. His granddaughter, the Snow Maiden, is his chief assistant.

This is a shopping center on the Red Square. In the video you will see the very upscale supermarket where the Party Officials could buy the fancy stuff way back in the day.

A distant view of the winter carnival on the Red Square