Наврез Байрамынъыз Мубарек Олсун! Or, Happy Vernal Equinox!

Or most literally, Happy New Day!

I'm all set up in my new solo digs in Simferopol. Now that I'm a 20-minute-or-less walk to every place I need to go, I get phone calls advising me to be somewhere in 20 minutes or less. For example, yesterday morning, I got a phone call about a protest that was quickly picking up steam. I jogged over with my camera and witnessed a sight which was eery and disorienting, all the more so once the sun-shiny early morning calm suddenly switched into an eery windstorm.

Aydir called to say that a protest was going on at the Crimean Autonomous Republic Verkhovna Rada, where Crimean Tatars set up tents a few weeks ago to protest the government's stalling in legally registering land claims made years ago.

I arrived to witness two simultaneously occurring protests: the first protest was the "Russian nationalist bloc" protesting the February law that mandated that all movies shown in Ukraine were now to be either dubbed or subtitled in Ukrainian (and not Russian). Many Russian-speakers - the majority in Crimea - are strongly opposed to this law.

But their protest was impeded by the clang of trash cans being beaten. The Crimean Tatar protest, much bigger than the Russian-bloc, was making quite a bit of noise to call attention to their cause. They were tired of being ignored, one participant told me.

I didn't stick around to see the Crimean Tatar protest tents get taken down later in the day by militsia with riot gear, but the word was that it wasn't pretty.

Later yesterday evening, when I was briskly assisting Milara-odzha in the making of late dinner chebureky, she would periodically dart out of the kitchen - despite not having eaten all day - to shake her rolling pin at the television screen for providing "disinformatsia" on the nature of the Tatar protest.

The reason we were feverishly making fried-dough-and-meat dumplings late at night was because the Navrez performance at the University ran for three hours. Navrez is not a religious holiday, but it's celebrated by many Muslims on the vernal equinox as the New Year. Yesterday, the Azerbaijani diaspora in Crimea hosted a Navrez performance at the University, and I was invited to sing two Crimean Tatars songs with my banjo "as a gift" (to whom?) from the Tatar Literature Department.

It was hard to compete with the other many booty-shaking acts, but the auditorium's worth of students was attentive enough and the two American friends I planted hooted for me at the end of my all-Crimean-Tatar performance. I delivered a short introductory word in Crimean Tatar that was more nerve-wracking than any performance I can recall since I was a teenager playing stormy Teutonic sonatas in competitive situations. Next time I might just lipsynch and strut around the stage instead, I think. 

Yesterday was a great example of the kinds of days I have been experiencing more and more in Simferopol - jammed full with conflict and confusion and sadness but also a heavy dose of absurdity and humor. Amidst yesterday's kitchen discussion of exactly what motivates the kind of "disinformatsia" that Milara-odzha objected to on the television, her older daughter observed that I had managed to coat my nose in flour. I told her this was all the rage on the streets of New York, so she smeared her nose with flour too.

Well, the phone just rang, but I don't have to be anywhere until the morning.