Decided it was about time to bring in some local culture into my sketchbook (actually got super worried about something (I don't even know what that was, but I was about to cry for some reason, yay...) and ended up separating from the girls I was hanging out with during the period in school when our art teacher told us to go outside and take part in the festival because turns out that somehow all of the teachers forgot to tell us that we were supposed to be there (lol) but the girls thought it was boring and we all went to the park even tho I didn't really want to but about 15mins later I ended up going back alone anyway but I didn't have mental energy to take part in the games and I also didn't see anyone I knew apart from my sister but she was with her friends, so I didn't want to bother, so it felt awkward to be playing these games by myself (and tbh most of them were for the elementary school kids but the students who took part in organizing and their friends also played, so I thought it would have been fine anyway), so I ended up sitting on a bench observing everything but that got old in few minutes and I thought that I could draw something to help me calm down (and it did) but I didn't really have any ideas apart from one but it's complicated to draw, so that will be for some other time, so I drew this scarecrow thingy that was in the middle of the field that is a huge part of the festival (I'll explain in a second))

This was a quick sketch, so it's kinda patchy but I wasn't really trying to make it nice

So this is called "Morė" (pronounced as "more-eh" (the "r" is rolled)). Every year during this festival people are asking for winter to leave and and at some point people set this scarecrow thingy on fire while chanting something like "winter winter, run out of yard".

There are two more iconic characters but they're supposed to be played by real people and I only saw one of them wandering around, so that got left out, but one of them stands for winter (he's usually really fat (people often put pillows inside of their shirts) and the other symbolises spring (he's skinny). At some point of the festival they fight and spring aka the weak one wins and that means that spring is coming to Earth. Everyone else is supposed to be wearing scary masks (usually devils or witches but they look different from the ones we usually see in western culture (there's a lot of brown color involved)). Also everyone is eating pancakes.

So that's the cultural diversity lesson for y'all today.