Putting names to faces.

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The water in the flat was cleaner this morning and by 10 I had taken a shower and had half a cup of coffee.

Just needing to go downstairs to get to class I was only five minutes late for my first lesson. It was Russian Literature with Zhanna, who is about 30 with long dark red hair. Our classroom is quite small, with a circular wooden table in the middle for seven students and a teachers' desk at the front. The wallpaper is light pink, the view from the window overlooks ulitsa Zhelyabova.

For the first half of the 90 minute 'para' the class introduced ourselves, so I finally got to know the names of the girls from Finland. The very attractive blonde haired girl is Tuuli, her friend Haidie sits next to her, Emi is beside her and I sit next to Christa, the tall girl with brown hair. In the second half we each wrote a mini-essay of 15 sentences about our dreams (I mentioned Kiev once or twice) and took turns to read them out - I only made two very small mistakes. We didn't even find out which literature we will be studying but it's something I'm looking forward to.

Tver doesn't have thermometer clocks, but I have found out that using my Russian phone I can send a text every morning for the local weather report. Today was minus 4.

In the lunch break I had time to get a biscuit from upstairs, before being summoned to an office at the university to hand in my passport for registration. A man called Dimitrii Andreevich took it off me: "Do you understand me? Oh, you were in Yaroslavl, of course you speak good Russian!" He's a decent man with a smart cardigan.

Things got worse in the afternoon. Even accounting for my bias against learning grammar it was a bad lesson. The teacher, Elena, is pleasant enough but boring and the work she gave is the type of exercises I did every day at Yartek. The students speak Russian at very different levels; some have just arrived in Russia for the first time, Michael knows the language superbly and myself, Christa and Tuuli speak it well. It makes it hard for Elena to communicate with us and I hate being asked "do you understand?" so often. Putting us into groups with people we can do the same work with seems practical, but the placement test didn't happen.

After classes I had my photo taken for my registration. To my surprise the lady with the camera asked me to smile, and let me choose my favourite picture. I bought a big bottle of Tverskaya vodka from the supermarket afterwards - with a polar bear sitting on black ice on the front - to christen the flat with after homework this evening! Our fridge also contains four litre bottles of Yarpivo and some biscuits.

I bumped into Tuuli in our corridor on the way to the internet room. We spoke in Russian, our second language, and fell back on our English if we needed to.

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Photos

Tver State University.
From ulitsa Zhelyabova.

A view from the second floor of the obshezhitie.
Looking towards Tverskoi Prospekt. Ulitsa Zhelyabova is the street on the left.