A lazy sunday, perhaps my twentieth in a row. I took my camera around town - as I do one day a week - and took some photos of ulitsa Sovetskaya. A lorry splashed me up to my thighs with muddy water for my troubles, at the furthest point from home. I spent the afternoon on my own at my kitchen table pondering the past, present and future with cups of coffee in my hand and all my photographs in front of me. The boy who sits with his back resting against the fridge in a hostel in Tver most evenings [View Full Entry]

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I found out this morning that I have an extra month in which to write my project. My evenings will now be less busy than I feared they would be, so I bought a chess set from the market. It has scratches on all the white squares and only one black knight, but apart from that it is in perfect condition. Taking one white knight off the table before playing won't interfere too much; the lady who owns the stall I bought it from was very friendly, and she can buy eight loaves of bread with the 70 roubles I gave [View Full Entry]

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The second university 'event' started in the building opposite the obshezhitie at 2.15. I sat at a table with four students from the history department, another boy called Roma and three girls. They were much easier to talk to than the students from the last party and we got on really well. The scripts that the presenters read out made quite a few people laugh. They turned Zhanna's patronising text into a parody, especially the part when Michael pretended to be ill from fear of being in Russia. The way Yenu fussed over him while he resisted her help defensively was [View Full Entry]

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We talked about Gogol's 'Revizor' in the literature lesson, and read a page about essay-writing techique in the afternoon. Ulitsa Trekhsvyatskaya is thawing so much that the middle part of the road is a river. The weather is warmer - plus 6 today - but it is dark all the time because of low grey clouds. A heap of snow the size of a car tyre crashed to the ground from the roof of a building twenty yards in front of me near bar Kalinin - I count myself extremely lucky that I bumped into Tamzin in reception before leaving the [View Full Entry]

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I went to lessons today, my first in five days. In Zhanna's class we made a list of adjectives to describe people's character, and with Aleksandr Ivanovich we corrected our translations. I need to develop my writing style in Russian, as I don't give constructions enough thought and everything I hand in at the moment is much simpler than I am capable of. I went to an antique shop in the afternoon. Getting inside was a puzzle, as there was a puddle of melted snow four feet wide all the way around the front of the shop. It meant I needed [View Full Entry]

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I woke up with a headache, and instead of going to Zhanna's lesson decided to do something worthwhile. But first I wanted to have a bath to freshen up. The water was running warm today but it is almost orange. Splashing it over my face to shave was unpleasant - there was a metallic taste whenever some went in my mouth and the water smells stale. My face and lips are dry from it and I always feel greasy after washing. And this is in the "zdanie innostrantsev", which is said to be better equipped than the obshezhitie over the road [View Full Entry]

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21 hours travelling in one weekend put paid to any ideas of going to classes today. I woke up at 2 in the afternoon. I spent the rest of the day in the internet room. While talking to (Tver) Michael about the elections in Belarus this evening I walked into the point of our kitchen window, which he had opened to let the smoke out as he was cooking. The right side of my forehead was swollen even by the time I touched it. It can't have just been the sore head that made me unhappy in the evening. My three [View Full Entry]

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We put our watches back rather than forward last night, so when the woman called our room at 11.30 and told us to leave at once we still thought it was half past 9. We struggled to pack our things and each have a shower in time but somehow we managed. Claire and Orphais had already left to explore Moscow for a day so there was just myself, Tamzin and Liisa left. Chris W picked up where he left off in December by organising a meal out for us and making sure we all got there in time. I remembered the [View Full Entry]

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Yartek is a thirty minute walk from Yaroslavl Glavnyi station - it took us almost exactly fourteen hours to get from my new school to my old one. While we walked I showed Liisa, Claire, Tamzin and Orphais the places that mean something to me; the poliklinika where I took my shirt off for the three women to examine me when I was ill, the Tolbukhina block of flats where I used to live, the Shinnik football stadium, the shop where I bought my winter coat, and Pizzeria Tashir. If the lady with the lazy eye (who always used to make [View Full Entry]

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Myself, Claire, Liisa and Tamzin set off from the obshezhitie at 10.30 this morning. When we got to the train station there was no elektrichka to Moscow until 2 o'clock, so we had lunch in a café until it was time to leave. The elektrichka was the same one that I took two weeks ago; a sort of long prison van with uncomfortable metal chairs, dirty windows and an untraceable damp smell. While they are travelling some Russians take the opportunity to sell things to other passengers. Every twenty minutes or so a person would come through the doors of our [View Full Entry]

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