Exploring… Eastern Europe

Some of my absolute favourite pretend travel over the years has been to Eastern Europe. Poland, Romania and Russia have shown themselves to be fun of joy and culture and warmth. Below is a run down of some of our favourite activities and how you can recreate them at home!

Crafts

There is nothing we love more than a craft project in our house and Eastern Europe has many different crafts that you can borrow or adapt as part of exploring Eastern Europe. My favourite was when we replicated the Polish Spring Festival of Marzanna. In this festival you make a straw doll of the winter goddess Marzanna and then set fire to it and throw it into a river to wash her away and to welcome spring. Luckily there is lots of straw around for Easter hats at this time of the year in lot’s of shops and so the festival was easy to recreate it the River Alt (and the Spring of 2020 was a very warm one – so I think maybe it works!)

Ebay is a great help and I was delighted to discover wooden Russian dolls on there for us to paint when we pretended to visit Russia. Penny went the traditional route with her dolls and Freddie painted spacemen and aliens which felt delightfully Russian to me. They still have the dolls and they make me think of our Russian weekend every time I see them.

Baker Ross is another great website with lots of crafty kits for kids. When we pretended to visit Romania I discovered that basket weaving was one of their traditional crafts and so we really enjoyed trying to create our own.

Adventures

When I think of Romania, I think of Count Dracula and both of the kids absolutely love dress up in their Halloween clothes. We learned all about Dracula and then found a suitably medieval ruin near to our house that looked very much like the amazing castles you could visit in Romania. Local history is often a saviour on our pretend trips,

I knew that the Polish airmen flew to Britain in 1939 when Poland was invaded and I knew that they had fought bravely side by side with the British in World War 2. What I had not known was that some airmen had been based very close to my house and were buried in the grounds of my local church. On our pretend visit to Poland we went to find them and to take them flowers. I still think about them every time I pass the church – so far from home.

The first thing Mark said when I mentioned Romania was ‘Nadia Comăneci’ – the first gymnast to get a perfect score in the Olympics. We watched her routine and then tried to replicate it as best we could. Penny achieved perfects tens.

Food

We enjoy both and eating out and cooking when we pretend to visit a country. Our Romanian adventures allowed for both and we enjoyed every mouthful of our delicious and authentic meal at the Grill Hunters in Southport. We also loved making a traditional strawberry cake (pandispan cu fructe).

Movies and Books

There is nothing we enjoy more than learning a new alphabet and we were lucky enough to have a friend staying with us during our pretend Russian adventure who was fluent in the Cyrillic script and taught us to write our names. A quick google will help you to do the same. You could even decorate your name and display it.

Our visit to pretend Russia was also the perfect time to watch the movie ‘Anastasia’ which is a beautiful animated version of the real life events of the death of the last Tsar of Russia. It does play fast and loose with the facts but I was a great way to start talking about Russian history with the kids and they loved watching it.

There are lots of books that help with learning languages from colouring books to story books. I am no linguist but I love looking at words and finding links with our own. Connection is so important.

And so that is how to find yourself exploring Eastern Europe. And, for us, the good news is that there is so much more to see!