Blogs from Tver, Centre, Russia, Europe - page 5

Natasha, a girl who we met at the event on friday, invited myself and Michael to a café this evening. She is very modest and easy to talk to. It was sweet how she worried so much trying to find a kofeiniya that was comfortable enough for her guests! We met up with Sonia and Arianne from Switzerland and sat around a low table lit by lamps, drinking cocoa and eating ice-cream. Michael told the story of how he bought some new shoe laces earlier in the day. When he got to the front of the line in the shoe repair shop the lady asked him what type he wanted. He replied 'black ones'. But which length? He said that he wasn't sure, at which point the woman behind him barged in front and said to ... read more

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 listening to Zemfira is very different to the one who walked along ulitsa Svobody in Yaroslavl every day while the summer sun was shining, listening to the songs coming from the curcus loudspeakers. It's the ... read more

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 just like a scene from 'Sasha and Masha', a sunday evening comedy on channel one. Each group of students spoke about their own country and taught the rest of the room their national song. When ... read more

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 to stand on a thin ledge for five minutes while I thought of a method of getting to the door. I stepped on a stone in the middle of the moat, which sank as I ... read more

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 thousand word project is in the front of my mind but not even started, and I will have to sacrifice a lot of things in the next five weeks to get it into a post ... read more