Monday.

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Lyudmila Giorgevna taught us this morning. We went to a different room to watch the news for half an hour, then talked about our newspaper articles for the rest of the lesson.

Karin and Linda are back from their trip to Lithuania. On the way the militsiya threw them out of the train in the middle of Belarus for not having the right type of visa. Not even Linda's 20 euro bribe saved them, they had to be driven to Minsk to register before they could cross the border and arrived in Vilnius a day late. A funny story to look back on but it must have been very scary at the time; by all accounts, and my own experience in Ukraine, border guards aren't the most pleasant of people.

The afternoon was slow; the weather is still making me lethargic and no-one has any plans at the moment. Tuuli and I decided to do our homework in a kofeiniya near Ploschad' Sovetskaya, to get out of the obshezhitie for an evening. We spent three hours pretending to be reporters from a Moscow TV programme, writing questions to ask the other students in our class about the lives of young foreigners in Russia.

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