Culture Café: Russia

New semester, new life, and new season of our popular Culture Cafés have come! The first ‘brand new’ Culture Café was held on the 24 th of January and was prepared by ESN HSE Moscow students with a great love. As you may have conjectured already, it was devoted to charming and mysterious RUSSIA!

Anastasia Ozerova, Margarita Muravitskaya, Polina Grishova, Fedor Schipitsyn, Irina Klimova and Ekaterina Kravtsova spoke a lot about Russian language, the most famous stereotypes (just in case you still have some), history, art and some useful life hacks.

We started with a small test to understand how much we really know about Russia, because obviously, it is not only matrioshka and bears. Guess what? Nobody knew that 77% of Russia is made up of Siberia or the word vodka comes from the Russian word ‘voda’ which means ‘water’. That means our main mission was to share everything we knew.

During the Culture Café, we learned some helpful Russian phrases. Furthermore, the bravest ones took part in “Russian speaking challenge” and got some nice souvenirs.

‹

Moreover, Russia is famous for its outstanding art. We listened to some Russian classical music, watched a video of famous ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and even danced Russian traditional dances together.

    

   

Russian eventful and quite complicated past has influenced the reality we all see today . Starting from 862 Russia was experiencing different history or governments of phases. But now it is called Russian Federation and it is diversity and attractiveness  make it one of the most popular tourist destination. 

In conclusion, please remember that HSE is about uniting people from all over the world and we are extremely happy that so many people come to every Culture Café as well as share their culture, ideas and experience! 

If you have any questions about Russia or Culture Cafes, feel free to ask ESN members (links are above). See you around!

Author: Ekaterina Kravtsova
Editor: Irina Klimova
Editor and proofreader: Ashley Dunn