Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Polish Easter

The weekend before last I was invited by my newly acquired friend Michal for the Polish Easter Picnic in Skyline Park nearby Saratoga. I extended Michal's invitation to Ania, Jakub and their adorable daughter Maja.

I met Michal during a scuba diving course that I took recently, where he was one of my instructors. Michal is also the head of Polish Yacht Club in SF and probably because of that most of his friends that attended the Easter Picnic were people that knew each other through the sailing connection.

Even though Ania, Jakub and I were much younger than the majority of people who were there and we did not know anybody else than Michal, still everybody was very open towards us and treated us as a part of their big family. Thanks to that this Easter did have a lot of homely feeling about itself.


As Polish tradition requires, there was plenty of delicious food:


Sweats section was particularly interesting:


Maja spent half of the picnic trying different home-made sweats:


There was even a basket with traditional "blessed" food:


And of course painted eggs:


As American Easter tradition requires, there were also plastic eggs with sweats inside that were later on hidden throughout the park for kids to search for:


Here kids are investigating the eggs that they found:


Maja showed no interest in this American tradition and instead she preferred to play with soap bubbles:


However, Maja was very interested in Mexican Easter tradition, which involved singing a special song and hitting the pink object filled with candies as strongly as possible, so that it breaks open letting it's contents drop on the ground for kids to collect:


Maja's cute smile won hearts of Mexican family...


... so that they invited her to join in their game:


But whose heart would not melt for this little angel?