Blogs from Tver, Centre, Russia, Europe - page 2

Some last photos that I thought belonged in my diary....... read more

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 easy going when things don't go their way and I amire them for it. The Finns and myself are learning, it's certainly a part of our sense of humour now. So at 8 o'clock this ... read more

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 in a region near Chechnya, was terrible. It is a part of the world where people value their family more than anything, where not just one parent but mum, dad and both grandparents take their children to school each morning. That is why the gunmen could take so many people hostage. In the afternoon I stayed in obshezhitie and made some plans for going away. The second ... read more

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 driven out of my own country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a soul like mine." My plan was to spend the rest of the afternoon writing my essay, but as I should know by now days in Russia are never so simple. Dimitrii Sergeevich knocked on the classroom door and put his head round, to tell me to go to the university's international office straight after ... read more

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 medium-sized outside mirror in Tver - maybe Russia - there is at least one girl looking at herself in it. I wonder how many women are late for meetings because they lost track of time while doing their make-up, and especially how many trams and trolleybuses have been missed because of high-heeled shoes. I have to confess that the Olimp entrance always gets me too, so much so that ... read more