Some pictures I took this winter, sharing a flat with Nastya... [View Full Entry]

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Some pictures I took this winter, sharing a flat with Nastya... [View Full Entry]

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Some pictures I took this winter, sharing a flat with Nastya... [View Full Entry]

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Some pictures I took this winter, sharing a flat with Nastya... [View Full Entry]

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Some, but by no means all, of my favourite days of the last nine months: YAROSLAVL, 2nd September 2005 to 7th January 2006: - My very first impressions of Russia. - A school day. Everything apart from me falling asleep on the Yartek sofa! - What a school day would have been like if I was born here. - The middle day of a first, unforgettable trip to Tatarstan. - A cold afternoon in an historic town. - The 25th Yartek play. - Reading week in the big city. (Day one of four.) - Ice-hockey, up close and personal. - The [View Full Entry]

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All that I have to do today is say goodbye. There is a train to Moscow at 10 this evening where I will stay with Helen for a day, buy some books, take a last look at Russia and get on another train to Lugansk in the east of Ukraine. I'll spend two days there with Ana, who I'm really looking forward to seeing again, then we'll go to her village, Popasnaya, for two weeks. Hopefully there will be one of Mrs. Kovalchuk's apple cakes waiting for me when I get there! It will be a chance to relax and let [View Full Entry]

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Some last photos that I thought belonged in my diary.... [View Full Entry]

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This morning in Lyudmila Giorgevna's lesson we gave our presentations of the essays we had written. Afterwards there was a leaving get-together in one of the classrooms, where myself Tamzin and Michael had a last chat with our teachers. Aleksandr Ivanovich, Zhanna, Elena, Lyudmila Giorgevna and Dimitrii Sergeevich the director drank coffee and ate biscuits with us and asked us about our plans for the summer. The sparkle in their eyes when I told them I was going to Kiev made me even more excited. Everyone, as ever, praised Michael for how well he spoke, told Tamzin how well she had [View Full Entry]

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I've been thinking about which parts of Russian life I haven't mentioned at least once in my diary. The first thing I thought of was the word 'бывает'. It roughly means "it happens" - what Russians say when something isn't done properly but no-one has the motivation to put it right. If a waitress makes you repeat an order three times then forgets it altogether, then бывает. If the woman in the post office refuses to give you an envelope - "there are none of them" - even though you can see some on her desk, then бывает. Russians are more [View Full Entry]

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I took my last saturday morning trip to the market today. It was busy as usual and the stalls had even spread onto the grass next to the road, as there wasn't enough space for everyone to take a place on the side of the street. I wanted to buy a lot, souvenirs so to speak and things that you could only find in a Russian 'rynok'. I chose two corduroy flat caps for 650 roubles; as always they looked better on the rack than on my head but they remind me so much of the Russian people that I couldn't [View Full Entry]

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