Play It Coooool

Добрый вечер!

I do apologise for having almost neglected this for a week or so, but such is life. It's been quite a busy week with quite a lot having happened. I've been lurking around here for nearly a month now, which has frankly flown by so far.

As I've found recently, if you stop going to the bar every day after lectures, this has both its positives and negatives. Positively, you don't end up blowing your weekly budget on needless over-indulgence, although on the other hand, there is nothing whatsoever to do. Evenings can seemingly drag on forever and ever, hence why trying to keep as full a diary as possible has been the order of the day recently.

I seem to have left off from last time bemoaning my lack of passport. Surprisingly this was swiftly rectified, and is "safely" back in my possession. Following this, Friday brought the spectacular Carelian Faces. This brought a much appreciated wind down at the end of the week, in the form of an international music festival. Friday was the first day, which hosted a number of very decent acts. Unfortunately I don't know the names of any of them, but there was this one with a moderately attractive front-girl, who were impressive. After this, it was on to the after party, which was roughly where I left my sobriety at the cloakroom and forgot to pick it up on the way out.

Moving on to Saturday, waking up feeling decidedly atrocious, and in need of a monstrous lie in. Patched up, but still shuddery and worse for wear, soldiered on to the end of Sunday, arriving just in time to witness a strange, yet extremely energetic Finnish glam rock band.

Sunday was Rob and Ben's birthday meal, in a nice little restaurant in the middle of town, serving exclusively local dishes. Pricey as it may have been, it was supreme. Having never tasted elk before, I didn't really know what to expect, but it's surprisingly divine.

Yesterday night was also a very good one. We were offered tickets by our English speaking teacher, Sasha, to see a classical music concert. Not one to stay in when there's something vaguely entertaining afoot, I accepted. The concert itself was interesting, a mixture of different pieces, the last of which a very strange medley of styles I wasn't really sure what to make of. The conductor was one of Sasha's good friends, so we went to the bar afterwards for a few drinks. Turns out he's an extremely nice guy, with no shortage of interesting things to talk about (and he's a blue, Gal).

Anyway, enjoy your heatwave in Britain... The temperature here is dropping like a stone, and at the moment it's about 7 degrees, and unlikely to ever get a great deal warmer. I think there was talk of a 12 degree scorcher on the way soon, so I'll keep the moderate weather coat handy just in case. Other than that, I think that's about it for now.

Пока! x

Dude, where's my passport?

It's that time of the day where I decide that I'm going to update everyone with how things are going on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To tell you the truth, everything's going fine. 3 weeks into this mission and it's starting to feel much less like a holiday and everything's starting to look a lot more regular again; regularity being a welcome new addition to my life to be perfectly honest. Even if it does come in a strange flavour.

Since Thursday, the weather has continued to work overtime on making Petrozavodsk the new Atlantis. Apart from a bit of respite yesterday where there wasn't a cloud to be seen all day, it was gorgeous (albeit at 5 degrees). It's definitely shaping up very quickly to be exactly the kind of weather we were previously warned of.

Saturday was an enjoyable day. Having walked around the city once again, checking out the extremely impressive Alexander Nevsky church, something Alexei missed out on his tour, presumably for timekeeping reasons. With its golden domes and sparkly interior, this was about as Russian a church as you are possibly going to get. Its immediate vicinity was in quite a pleasant looking park, which itself was surrounded by a not so pleasant industrial district, once again, how Russian...

Below: The Alexander Nevsky church, with statue in front. At the base of the statue is a memorial to the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team, who were killed in a recent air disaster.

After this, several of us decided to make some more Russian friends by following Jono to a Couchsurfing meeting, which was, again, thoroughly enjoyable, even if we did form a rather large Angliskii corner, forcing many of the Russians to test out their English abilities!

As you may imagine, this made Sunday a complete write off, venturing out of the house only for orange juice and MAXI BACON crisps, just one member of an extremely exotic portfolio of Russian crisp flavours, standing alongside such titans as Mushrooms and Sour Cream, Crab and Red Caviar. On a vaguely food related note, I think I've made the biggest mistake of my life incorrectly admitting to my landlady that I can stand tvarog. Tvarog is a cottage cheese kind of thing daubed in sour cream, and something else, it's not an acquired taste, it's an acquired hatred, and it doesn't take long to acquire either.

Below: Flower arrangement as a memorial to the fallen Soviet soldiers in the great war. An eternal flame stands on the plinth behind.

Currently the university has my passport AGAIN. This is the result of yet another ridiculous bureaucratic requirement, meaning they initially provide you with a visa which falls about 3 weeks short of what we actually need. Reading between the diplomatic lines and stamps, I can only imagine that the fat bastards in Moscow are all too aware of this, and the necessity to give them another shed load of money, but it's fucking annoying. Thankfully my lack of organisation meant that I needed to get passport photos done in Russia, but those organised people who brought colour photos were told they needed to get up on Sunday and get some black and white ones done, they don't accept colour photos for whatever reason...

On a change of topic, this week brings much fun, I feel. Now in possession of a ticket to Carelian Faces, an international music festival, the weekend is shaping up nicely. £8 for a two day festival seems extremely reasonable, I feel that's not going to be my only expense this weekend though, if you know what I mean.

I think that'll do for now. Once again, thank you for reading! :D

Спокойни ночи x

Umbrella...ella...ella

The Russian weather has, so far, been extremely changeable. One minute it's absolutely lashing it down, then the next minute, the sun is preoccupied with a battle against the clouds to show us a small taster of what we're, for the large part, missing. It's incredibly annoying, as it makes walking anywhere a hazard, not for how slippery things become, but for the ridiculous conditions of the pavements and roads.

I'll never again complain about the "pot holes" you occasionally encounter in England, by comparison, Russian pot holes make them look like bowling greens. Russian pot holes create swimming pool sized puddles, and they're literally all over the pavements and roads.

Aside from weather related issues, things are continuing to go swimmingly (boom). Still nothing has gone very wrong, as many assumed would happen to me immediately after arriving.

I'll gloss over Tuesday and Wednesday, as they were another pair of unremarkable days, spent whiling away post-lesson hours in the bar, but today was a very reasonable day.

After getting up at what felt like the crack of dawn, but was really only 8:30, the group trudged towards the university for a tour of the town by our culture teacher, known affectionately by a select few as Mr Sanchez. The tour was interesting enough, but the rain put a dampener (on fire) on things a little as we struggled to contain our excitement looking at a very old tree.

Below: A picture of the town statue of Lenin, chilling with a hat.

For some extremely odd reason known only to some hideously fat, almost certainly cigar-smoking bureaucrat somewhere in Moscow, presumably getting paid millions for making stupid decisions like this, we all had to have another HIV test. Maybe it's in case I happened to catch HIV in the 3 week interim between tests, who knows, but they charged us a cost of around £15, and some blood for the "privilege". As if 15 English students bursting into a Russian sexual health clinic wasn't bad enough, they made us wear bread bags on our feet, and despite the protestations of a few, I'm not overly convinced it's going to catch on.

Having bowed to the demands of the Russians for our blood, and having also taken in some carbohydrates, a walk around the lake was in order. Obviously it was raining, but as everything's become relative, it wasn't too bad. There were a number of interesting things to witness, including a Lada with racing stripes having crashed into a lamppost, several buildings which looked like crack dens, an aggressive looking dog and, later on, a huge looking shopping centre called Tetris.

Below: A picture of said Lada crashed into a lamppost.

I've gone for brevity for a change today, instead of the usual titanic length of post. Hopefully it's still readable, and I'm still not sounding like a pretentious twat, they are my only two aims. Anyway, thank you for reading :D

Спокойной ночи x

In Between Days

It's not been a very long time since I wrote the previous instalment to the everlasting story of my time in Mother Russia, and to tell you the truth, not a great deal has really happened in the interim. But as you're probably madly refreshing the page in order to be the first to get any lowdown, I thought it'd be rude to disappoint.

Unfortunately, the weather seems to be extremely slowly reverting to the common stereotype I was previously warned of. Gone are the Indian Summer-esque afternoons and in comes the tedium of the grey sky and constant threat of rain. Rather reminiscent of my time this Summer in Switzerland to be honest.

Realising that I've almost completely neglected to actually describe the city in any great depth, I'll give it a go here. In lieu of any proper content, I'll try and put across my views on how things actually are. My initial impressions of Petrozavodsk are that, walking around, there's almost a sense of "what could have been". Walking down Prospekt Lenina, the main road running through the centre of the city, the architecture really is very nice, and wouldn't look particularly out of place in a lot of big European cities, the bank of the lake is another really pleasant place to be, the Russian authorities haven't neglected this area too much (apart from the abundance of asbestos floating about, but we'll overlook this one under artistic license I guess...), and consequently, there's an abundance of monuments to times-gone-by of former Soviet glories littering the vicinity.

Where the town completely shoots itself in the foot though, is the day to day maintenance of the place. The pavements are in, for want of a better way of putting it, an atrocious condition. When it rains, the unevenness of the pavements creates a polka-dot pattern of puddles strewn across it. The main roads aren't a great deal better either. After visiting Sofia back in January 2010, it seems to me that this is just the way they do things in this end of Europe, the sublime to the ridiculous often in the same field of vision.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I dislike the place at all, I think it's a very nice, quaint place to be, and the surrounding environs look very nice. But it all looks like a glass bottle version of Russia as a whole, opposites living together, and creating something which, to the Western European, looks a tad strange.

The university itself is in a very nice looking, centrally located building. But even the university looks at times a bit strange, the overbearing nature of the Russians means that a lot of the time it feels totally alien to university at home. There's nothing like Bar One, in fact, most of the people you see dashing around the corridors don't even look old enough to be drinking; lessons are segregated by a recording of a school bell (which I'm still regarding as a welcome novelty to be honest...); and there's a canteen which gets rammed at lunchtime, everything sometimes seems a bit reminiscent of times gone by before I went to university.

Having said all that, it doesn't mean that it's not very good, I'm still really enjoying what we're doing at university, the lessons are engaging, and I'm learning all the time, something I'm not really used to doing on a regular basis. And I'm still enjoying living here, it's something that I'm still surprised hasn't effected me more than it has.

Foodwise, it's certainly been an eye opener. Think for a minute about what you eat for tea in England, and a for a lot of you, you'll realise that you eat a very large amount of foreign food. It's completely different here. So far, everything I've eaten has been about as stereotypically Russian as you can imagine, and weirdly enough, it's absolutely delicious! The only gripe I can possibly come up with is that literally everything is fried, everything. The family I'm living with are still lovely, and bring me copious quantities of tea. Fantastic.

Moving swiftly on, I'll revert to explaining what's happening in my all new Russian hive of activity (sometimes). Yesterday Tatiana and I traipsed through the forest to the supermarket, which is incidentally absolutely huge. If you've ever been to Costco or Makro, you'll understand what sort of scale I'm on about. Having bought numerous items from there, sorting my internet out became a new priority, having used up all my Megafon download limit... A quick trip to Beeline and a new internet plan later, and that's sorted.

It's looking like Kizhi is back on the cards this weekend too, our first, long overdue (well, a week anyway), excursion from the town. Learning our lesson, we're booking tickets earlier and just keeping fingers crossed for the weather, even though this is the exact situation Sod's Law was invented for.

I realise that I've just managed to create another behemoth of a post out of almost nothing, but this is what evenings here are designed for. Hopefully some fortunate soul absolutely loves this, and to them, I salute. But thank you anyway for reading because you feel some sort of moral or social obligation :D.

До следующей встречи! x

So far, so very very good.

It's Saturday, which means one thing. I've been in this country for a whole week now, one milestone down, presumably several more meaningless milestones to encounter.

We were supposed to be going to Kizhi today, in case you'd forgotten, that was the lovely complex of wooden buildings on an island somewhere on Lake Onega. In the end, we didn't even let the weather decide whether we went or not, it was that they'd simply run out of tickets (at the price of £45 return, I'm not entirely sure how they've managed). So Kizhi will wait for another weekend whilst we ploughed on with looking for something else to do today.

The group opted for a trip to the cinema, this is also the cinema which at night doubles as a nightclub, strange, yet an oddly practical dual usage of a building (although by all accounts, the nightclub is shit). We bought our tickets and refreshments, and wondered what Columbiana had to offer us. For anyone wondering whether to bother at home, it definitely isn't going to become a classic at any point soon. Although not being able to go to Kizhi was a bit of a disappointment, this was a very enjoyable way to otherwise spend the day.

Without wanting to make this blog post spiral into a weird reverse chronological order, I'll pick up where the last blog post left off. It would appear that I was watching the very disappointing England game. Since that point, it transpires that I've used all my "fast" internet allowance, leaving me with some speed reminiscent of dial up, a.k.a. absolutely useless, a bit like the England team come to think of it. Anyway, Wednesday and Thursday didn't bring a great deal new as far as I can remember, two very unremarkable days.

Friday was however, relatively eventful. A lot of hope of going to Kizhi had been pretty much extinguished by the fact that nobody had even mentioned the plan for a number of days, but on Friday, Roy Bivon, the RLUS company director arrived, and said that he didn't anticipate there being a problem with buying tickets on the day (shows how much you know R-Biv...) so hope had been resurrected as long as the weather stayed clear (which it did...). We were also finally put into sets based on Russian ability. This had been something I'd been wanting for quite a while, because it was seemed a bit of a farce having people who'd only been learning for a couple of years at university, struggling with people who'd been learning the subject for 7 or more years being held back at the same time. Anyway, the groups have been drawn out, and I'm quite grateful for that.

After Friday's lessons, a mini-tour of the Petrozavodsk shopping culture ensued. This essentially consisted of walking around and walking into any building looking remotely interesting, Much hilarity was had at various Russian translations of all things English, Секс в большом городе 2 (Sex in a Big Town 2=Sex in the City 2) being just one example. A pointless aside, that people who know me, know that I would find this fantastic. When you go to a cash machine and withdraw a reasonable amount, the cash machine then proceeds to ask you whether you want these as large value notes, small value, or mixed value. Withdrawing 1000 roubles (£20), I naturally chose small value notes, being unable to actually spend my other 1000 rouble note, due to over-zealous Russian cashiers. Anyway, the cash machine seemed to explode with money, as it delivered lots of small value notes, making, by my reckoning, Russia to be the only country I know that you can withdraw £20 and be unable to close your wallet properly.

As you can see below, the well-oiled propaganda machine of years gone by has not exactly about to die out in any way. The text reading "You need Russia!".

Later and it was Friday night, therefore time to go out. Being unable to go to Deja Vu, due to there being no free tables (it was the same today at 5:00PM, never actually been able to buy anything from there...), we went to Neubrandenburg once again, which has rapidly become my bar of choice in Petrozavodsk. After sinking a few, we met up with some Russians that Kate and Tom knew from a previous jaunt. We accompanied Evgeny, Misha and I think it was Oleg to Kivach, and set up camp once again. Ironically, the action only really started after we decided to go home, as some very enthusiastic Russian man attempted to tell Rob to leave the city, causing a fair amount of Russian agro over passports. Once we bundled ourselves into a taxi however, the danger obviously subsided, but another small reminder of how Russia can sometimes be a little bit more volatile than you think. Who can say what happened to that man, one can only hope though that he was completely ravaged by a Karelian bear somewhere though.

Aside from everything I've pointed out already, everything seems so far to be going really very well. I seem to be settling in much faster than I thought I would, and everything seems to be suddenly gaining a new sense of normality to it, again, much much faster than I anticipated. Unfortunately, we have to give our passports over to the university at some point during the next week, so the university can take 6 weeks to put a new sticker into it saying they don't mind me staying until I'm supposed to, so unfortunately, due to ridiculous anti-terrorism laws, none of us are allowed to leave the city in the interim, so whilst Petrozavodsk is a nice little town from what I've seen, that's exactly what it is, a little town, so things might start getting a bit boring at some point. On the plus side though, we get our visas back just in time for reading week, so much fun will be had there, whatever I happen to end up doing.

Anyway, I realise I've probably made this a bit longer than I could have, but I'm not really in it for the conciseness, as you've probably gathered. Once again, if you've read it, then thank you very much, and hopefully I'll post another one at some point in the near future :D

Пока! x

From Russia with Love

I realise that I've not exactly kept this blog as well updated as I would have liked, but the fact of the matter is, that up until a few days ago, there was very little to speak of that anyone would have found remotely interesting. Unless you just really are that interested in my HIV test induced trips to Huddersfield, or the numerous bus journeys I've had to take, I'll skip those bits.

It took a fair while for what I'm actually doing to really sink in. I think it was only really last Monday that the magnitude of what I was doing really hit me, and even then, it was only because I had nothing else to occupy my mind with, and didn't want to start packing quite just yet. In any case, my visa arrived on the Wednesday, and seeing the words "Джош Рук" written on one of the pages sort of confirmed my suspicions...

After taking the plane down from Manchester (bourgeois), and staying in a hotel near Heathrow somewhere (bourgoiser), I arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5 at about 7:00am to say the least fairly confused and groggy, but after working out where to put various bags (only using 13.5kg of the 22kg allowance...) it was through to the checked in bit, and straight to the bar. The flight itself was nondescript, I'm sure you all know what a flight is like. After getting out of the airport and meeting with all the people we were supposed to meet with, we encountered two buses, a nice clean luxurious coach, and a grotty, horrible soviet tin box with about 9 wheels. Obviously sod's law came into contention, and we got the shit bus.

The bus journey to Petrozavodsk was a strange one. For starters, the driver insisted on using the hard shoulder in order to allow cars to overtake in the other lane, putting the numerous wicker basket and fruit selling babushkas at perilous levels of risk, secondly, every time I looked out of the window, it was pretty much the same, trees, trees and trees everywhere, for 400km, there was nothing else to see outside the window other than the odd babushka selling things in the middle of nowhere, or a petrol station. Possibly the highlight of the journey was stopping for someone to go for a piss in the middle of nowhere, allowing some strange man who was stuck overnight in the forest 50km away from his destination to get on the bus for a free ride after shouting at the driver for a bit. I think this was just after the bus started swerving all over the road because the driver pretty much lost control of the thing.

Eventually (an eternity later...), we arrived in Petrozavodsk and separated off into our various new Russian keepers. Thankfully, I've been landed with an extremely nice family. Tatiana is the head of the family, and speaks remarkably good English, which at times can be a godsend, and at times...no it's definitely a godsend; her husband, Sasha; and daughter Liya. I've been given excellent treatment, and made to feel very 'at home' with them. Thankfully, Lucy is living in the flat literally next door to mine, it's definitely helped having someone else to get used to the vicinity with, but neither of us really understood what was happening at that time of night when we were both stuck into the back of a car and driven away somewhere. Getting to the university is something I think I've just about come to terms with, it's 12 roubles for a single ticket (24p), so transport is cheap (as are a lot of things in this country come to think of it). Below is a picture of the street I live on, very soviet I'm sure you all agree, but inside the flats it's much much different.

The weather so far has been absolutely glorious, sunshine all day long, don't really know what people are on about when they say that Russia has cold Winters, take it from someone who's been, they just don't know what they're talking about.

University started yesterday, which was an interesting new experience, all the teachers are incredibly nice so far (whether this will extend to them coping with my lack of Russian, only time will tell). Lessons from people who don't actually speak English is a good idea in that it makes you just get on and try and listen to them, but it does have its drawbacks with absolutely no fail safe if you just don't have a clue.

The town itself is quite a nice one. Parts of it are a bit run down, but that's what you sign up for when you go to Russia. Apart from that, it's got quite pretty surroundings, and the lakeside area is one of those places you can just lose hours and hours without actually doing anything, the picture below is one where I worked out how to use the panoramic mode on my phone camera, but it doesn't give you anything like the sheer scale of the lake we're talking about (2nd biggest one in Europe).

The Russian people are actually nothing like the preconceived notion I had whatsoever, all of the ones I've met so far seem to be extremely pleasant and welcoming. The ones I haven't met, but have seen in some way do seem to be a little mental though, take this one for example pictured below, who instead of sitting behind a car which had been severely cut up by a truck, insisted on taking the shortcut...not something you would tend to see in England.

http://i54.tinypic.com/fly2x3.jpg (HUGE, so had to just link it)

Anyway, we decided to go out on our second night, sort of to see what the town had to offer, sort of to just catch up with ourselves again after that ridiculous journey, and an exhausting and bewildering change of scenery from England. We first went to the student bar, "Kivach", after realising that we couldn't find anywhere which wasn't full, which is a nice enough bar, sort of reminiscent of a Russian version of Interval. Then we moved across to Neubrandenburg, a German themed bar, which was slightly better I think.

I'm currently sat here watching England narrowly edge past Wales in yet another disappointing game of football, some things don't change then, but on the plus side, I have worked out how to use iplayer from here, which as any student knows, is a huge bonus.

Anyway, I think I've used up enough of your valued time, and I'll leave it there for now. I can't think of any hideous detail I've omitted anywhere, but if there is one, then I'll probs just try and include it somewhere later. Word on the street is that we're going to Kizhi this weekend, google it, it looks fantastic, in fact, I'll do it for you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizhi, so I'll update at the very latest hopefully after that. I hope I haven't sounded like a pretentious twat whilst updating you, but if I have, I do apologise a little bit. And with that, thank you for reading if you did, appreciated.

Cпокойной ночи :D x