http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Campo/ Travel adventures in journals and photos from Campo en-us Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:24:16 BST Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:24:16 BST The play started at 7 so everyone met at the school at 5 to get ready. My costume was Jamie's grey trousers a white dress shirt and matching bowtie a bottle green butler's jacket and the valenki. My twenty minutes in makeup involved a man squeezing an entire tube of hair gel over my head combing my hair into an 19th century centre parting and sticking some of my fringe to my forehead with glu http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Yaroslavl/blog-200382.html Some pictures I took this winter sharing a flat with Nastya... http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Ukraine/Kyiv/blog-119412.html Some pictures I took this winter sharing a flat with Nastya... http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Ukraine/Kyiv/blog-119393.html Some pictures I took this winter sharing a flat with Nastya... http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Ukraine/Kyiv/blog-119392.html Some pictures I took this winter sharing a flat with Nastya... http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Ukraine/Kyiv/blog-119391.html Some but by no means all of my favourite days of the last nine monthsYAROSLAVL 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. http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Northwest/Moscow/blog-85837.html Some last photos that I thought belonged in my diary.... http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58605.html 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 http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58589.html This morning in Lyudmila Giorgevna's lesson we gave our presentations of the essays we had written. Afterwards there was a leaving gettogether 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 http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58587.html 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 '107310991074107210771090'. It roughly means it happens what Russians say when something isn't done properly but noone has the motivation to put it right. If a waitress makes you repeat an order three times then forgets it altogether http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58585.html 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 http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58584.html Lyudmila Giorgevna's lecture this morning was about terrorism but later it turned into a discussion about 'what type of world we live in'. The two adjectives that first came into my mind were American and small. Everyone agreed that it is fair in parts and unfair in others. At the end we watched a documentary about the Beslan shooting on September 1st 2004. What happened in Beslan a village http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58583.html I needed another liein today. I went to Zhanna's class after lunch still yawning but there were only two of us there so I could just sit in the corner with two bottles of fruit yoghurt and write a few more paragraphs of my essay the Russian black market in the late 1980s. At the end of the lesson Zhanna said to me Jon it's our last lesson we won't see each other again can I ask you a quest http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58582.html The weather really changed today and it rained all morning and afternoon. In Aleksandr Ivanovich's class we translated quotes into Russian from writers such as George Bernard Shaw Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. My favourite is from James Joyce All things are inconsistent except the faith in the soul which changes all things and fills their inconsistency with light but though I seem to be drive http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58581.html Again I woke up this morning feeling weak. It is as if I lose energy every night rather than get it back even though my bed is becoming quite comfortable. My snooze alarm is now fifteen minutes rather than ten and there are more of them. Before I did anything I tidied my room threw away all the worksheets that I know I will never read again sorted my books and made a 'miscellaneous' folder of http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58337.html I woke up feeling exhausted this morning and didn't start to feel any better. I procrastinated over my essay had some lunch and chatted to Michael for most of the afternoon. When I went to the shops to buy some yoghurt I had to weave past two girls at the doors to Olimp who were brushing their hair in front of the glass. For every at least mediumsized outside mirror in Tver maybe Russia the http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-58323.html I will tell people that a positive part of staying in Tver is how relatively close it is to Moscow meaning it's easy to go there for the day whenever you feel like it. Having said that every time I had been so far it had been planned a few days before and I had someone to go with or meet me on the other side. So this morning when I woke up and had nothing to do I decided to buck the trend and g http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Northwest/Moscow/blog-58321.html In Lyudmila Georgevna's lesson this morning we spoke about adoption especially of Russian children to european and american families. It was good to have another debate as a group and the articles we were given were useful. There are more than a million children in Russia with no parents. Some have died many have abandoned them as alcoholism or drugs have ruined their own lives. Christa used to http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-57882.html After getting back from Moscow at 2 last night I didn't make much of an effort to open my books this morning. I had a relaxed day walked to the shops and back a few times and cleaned the kitchen.I took my work outside in the evening and sat on a bench behind the statue of Lenin. It felt a bit lonely being the only one in the park not drinking beer with their friends. I had read a couple of pages http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Centre/Tver/blog-57456.html I went back to Moscow with Liisa this morning to take the photos that I should have taken on saturday. We took the early elektrichka at 8.30 and were so tired that we barely said a word to each other for the three hour journey. For as long as my eyes were open the scenic route made a pleasant change to the industrial one especially when we crossed over the lake.My first chore was to buy my ticke http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Russia/Northwest/Moscow/blog-57455.html