Lighting up and releasing nebesnie fonariki, or sky lanterns, is a beautiful tradition that I first noticed on Victory Day. After the amazing fireworks, I saw the warm light of a couple of lanterns that were floating away into the sky.
This last weekend, Lera got our group a couple to send off as a way to celebrate the end of classes. Each of us thought of a wish that we wanted to make, and set out to the front end of the GZ with our fonariki and some matches. I had noticed that lantern-lighting can be a bit difficult when I saw someone making an unsuccessful attempt on Victory Day, and it did turn out to be pretty tricky.
The way fonariki work is that you hold the lantern upside-down and light the fuel (in our case waxy combustible square), attached to the base of the lantern by metal wire, on fire in order to fill it up and make it buoyant.

We tried our best, but the wind had other plans. One big gust and a little bit of screaming later, the flaming square of lye was on the ground, and Chet had already fashioned the paper part of the lantern into a hat. Lera reminded us that the first blini is always bad, and we began to set up our second lantern. (nearby the lye was still burning on the ground). The second one did go better than the first, and we let our fonarik off into the night. Here’s a video of the exciting moment –

What you don’t see is what happened a few minutes later, when we started to realize that the lantern was on fire and that it was falling back down to earth some distance away. We decided that what mattered was that our fonarik had been in the sky even for a little bit, and that our wishes would still come true.