Berlin Airlifted back to Foggy Albion

This is more a blurry hangover from the MGU Good Times than any continuation of their loose narration.

Also, where previously on this bloggy events were related more or less on the spot, any that you find here are being recollected through foggy haze, from a warm and cosy armchair, three time zones and about 1559 miles away in West London.

First of all, a big shout out to Dzho and Dzhon who remain in MGU carrying on the good times and flying the Cambridge flag. I was thinking of publishing all the sms-ki that Dzhon sent me throughout my time in Moscow and which kept me very entertained but I've decided I can't be bothered. Here's Dzhon though, in all his glory:

Dzhon in all his glory. I miss you, Dzhon.

Second of all, here are some useful sites-

Cambridge Uni Russian Society - a constant support before, after and during my trip to Moscow. Nice bunch of people and if you're in Cambridge it's definitely worth going to their Wednesday evening Russian conversation sessions in the Grad Cafe (near the Anchor) from 8pm every week in term time.

vihodigulat.ru - I saw this group's poster while I was queuing to register in the first couple of weeks and 'twas a glimmer of light in dark days. Student run group that do fun things in and around Moscow. Worth registering with them to receive their emails. They have a useful site with stuff like Russian slang dictionary and more good links. Also turned out to be pretty much the coolest people I got to know while I was in Russia (apart from Dzhon, of course).

lookatme.ru - a good site with good info and good radio stream which plays good music

tutu.ru - Russian train timetables and tickets

Afisha - basically What's On in Russia, everyone knows about this site

and finally a pretty good online Russian dictionary

not that I've succumbed to pressure for advertising or anything...

Turd of all (as they say in Ireland)...

So things are good back in the UK, if pretty damn weird. Air travel is way too fast for me, and the way it just lifted me up in minus 10 and snowy and Russia and Russian language and dumped me more or less still drunk into foggy drizzly mild polite England with black taxis and health and safety in a matter of hours was way too much for me, after a gradual assimilation into Russia over some months. I find myself looking at everything with the wide eyes of a foreign tourist; wanting to speak Russian, especially if I need to ask for directions or order food; wanting to take photos of stuff like bacon, geese, pubs, green grass, post boxes; wanting to barge slow walking people out of the way especially in public transport; almost getting killed by traffic which drives on the other side of the road; sleeping weirdly and dreaming I'm in Moscow; getting angry at people who talk loudly in public places or on public transport.

In some ways though it's nice to feel I don't need to get used to being in the UK. To my relief I got my Iranian visa on Friday no trouble (boogie woogie!), and so I'm off again, this time to Tehran, next week, all being well.

It's great just to see family and friends and sort myself out. Just to take a breath, before plunging in to the second half of my year abroad, which will indubitably be another good dosage of culture shock and yet more crazy escapades. Watch this space, I guess.

love to all,

Glen

Komarovo Dreamin' (on a winter's day)

Soon to be Emgay ooo Good Byes….

If you have seen the film Inception, you’ll know that as soon as a character in the film begins to realise that a dream is a dream, and not reality, the surrounding landscape begins to crumble around the edges.

I arrived in Moscow at 6.35am the other day. While I had been away, there was freak winter rain, which froze a thick layer of smooth, shining, transparent ice onto everything. Many trees had collapsed under the weight, and branches and twigs, branchlets and berries all twinkled and glimmered and tinkled and shimmered under their newfound bling in the early morning sun and wind. The city was as quiet as you might expect a city to be at the crack o’dawn during the biggest public holidays of the year, and I felt like, after just a couple of weeks away, I had returned to witness the eery aftermath of a silent apocalypse.

We had a couple of gorgeous sunny days of indescribable beauty.

The sky has greyed and the temperature has risen since, and the ice on the twigs, telephone lines, lamp posts, has started to crumble round the edges, while lumps of snow and ice and icicles come crashing down from the rooftops, as if these four and a bit months really have all been a bizarre Inception-style dream, which is coming now to an increasingly conscious collapse.

Indeed, it’s difficult to know what has happened and what hasn’t when I’m the only more or less reliable and accessible witness to events. But, in any case, we find ourselves in a new year, still trying to catch up with the last, and, memory or fantasy, for this blog it doesn't really matter. Onwards!

A Festive Foray into the Frozen North!

she got a cold nose.

Two of us from Cambridge weren’t returning to the Yu Kay for Nyu Yeer or Christmas. So we went to Petrozavodsk!

Here are some frosty stats

Air temperature on arrival: minus twuhenty nine degrees centimagrade

….that’s about all the stats I can think of for the minute. But I think that’s about enough. Luckily Russian apartment blocks are built like polar bears – 1) the heating system runs off seals (not really) and 2) they have a low (or is it high?) surface to volume ratio... basically the kind of surface to volume ratio that means that they have not much surface area given the volume so when you crank up the heating to full speed ahead it’s toasty warm on the inside and you can admire the view in a t-shirt.

We got recipes for gravy and stuffing from my Mumma and I had a bottle of whisky and Jo made a great xmas cake so the short days and long nights flew by.

We did get out and about though. The temperature made the place look really amazing. All exposed hairs freeze, condensation from factory chimneys immediately starts going down, icy breath in general from people and cars and houses comes billowing out in little cloudlets, and all this moisture in the air freezes to more or less every surface of everything. It was very cool. We were lucky because it wasn’t windy, so the snow remained thick on the branches, electricity lines, rooftops, etc looking beautiful, and the short days were light and bright.

Except on the final day which was windy and grey when we decided to go for a walk around town because it was only -17, and froze on the lake:

us at the lake looking frozen.

We were staying with old friends of mine and it was great family time, just as xmas should be.

Cultural activities included balalaika concert, cross country skiing, children’s karate championship*, cinema, private concert from a quality Russian rapper, fetching water from an underground spring, and eating elk soup.

*I was a specator.

Our hero’s frigid escapades continue as he ventures first to St Petersburg, and then on to deepest darkest Komarovo, clad in almost nothing but felt boots, a Christmas hat, and a canvas satchel…

I arrived home to St Petersburg to some other old friends, again early in the morning after another night train. I couldn’t work out the water heater and had a cold shower then had some tea and set out to meet a couple of academics from Cambridge. It just so happened that the snow and ice was being cleared off their roof just when I arrived, above their entrance, and the yardman just told me “run!” I guess dicing with death is just what I do. We had caviar for breakfast, got some money from cash machines, bought sim cards, and were photographed in front of the Winter Palace for the Cambridge Middle Eastern Studies website.

In Russia, New Year’s Eve is the main festival of the year. It is more of a family celebration, like Christmas is for us. Then they have Orthodox Christmas on the 7^th of Jan (although on the whole not everyone is bothered about this, just people who are Orthodox), and the holidays go on until about 10^th or 11^th. Our Christmas is just a thing they have heard of but don’t go in for really. They have Christmas trees and Christmas music as we know it but here it’s all for New Year. It was fun seeing people taking trees home with them in the metro, and hearing jingle bells (that song that monkeys call jungle bells) playing on the accordians in the underpasses.

On the 30^th two of us went out to the dacha (country house) to get the stove going and have it all warm for the 31^st. Their dacha is a creaky old wooden house, with coal heating in the kitchen, in the middle of the woods by the Gulf of Finland. The snow was very deep.

dacha.

We spent our time there eating, sleeping, and playing hockey on the pond down the hill through the woods. Also watching Monty Python, which was all the more hilarious and bizarre for being at the dacha in Komarovo. There was a constant flow of guests both from the city and from nearby, of all ages. At 1am on 1^st January after a big New Year's meal we all went down to the crossroads and met other families and friends. Everyone brought their own fireworks. The occasional taxi would try to get through over the snowy and icy road, and groups of people were coming and going and passing through, but thankfully that didn’t hinder drunk men, children and dogs from setting off their flaming rockets towards overhead electricity lines and trees from different points within the crowd and at different angles. Our set of fireworks included bangers, rockets, and the kind of bright green and red flares you see on war films when people need to be rescued at sea in low visibility from seven kilometres away.

hockey on the pond.

Sunny day at the beach: The Gulf of Finland, about 1pm.

The highlight of my return to St Petersburg was the arrival of the other lodger from the far eastern islands off Siberia and Japan. We ate home-caught, home-prepared caviar and dried fish, washed it down with pepper vodka, listened to his quality collection of vinyl, and sat up til 6 while he told us of snow, bears and something along the lines of the true meaning of life.

Back in Moscow

Things in Moscow are more or less as I left them. My first conversation with my neighbour was Happy New Year followed by discussion about how he has replaced the loo seat, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of this change. There was a fat rat waiting for me in the kitchen rubbish chute to welcome me back. The smells are all the same. The cockroaches came to say привет. In short, everything is as it should be. There are some changes, for better and for worse: I have a new bed which is just long enough and a massive improvement from the one I had since August, which was made of three square mattresses next to each other which all together reached not quite as far as my ankles. Meanwhile, however, the voice has changed in the metro, which is a bit weird. But in any case I’m now into the final stretch of my Russia stint for the year, so who cares. And while I’m not at all desperate to leave, I’m looking ahead to getting back to the motherland, and then on to Iran, inshallah. In preparation for the Islamic Republic I’m trying to get used to eating meals cross-legged on the floor, and I've been enjoying listening to Nina Simone’s “Gimme a pigfoot (and a bottle of beer)”…

That's all for now. Lots of love, and best wishes for a Happy New Year.

KROKODIL GENA COMES TO STAY

Dread times are upon us at emgay ooo.

The last post suggested that we were just getting to the beginning of the end. As if in response, already on Tuesday I was told in no uncertain terms that "it's already the end" "we're done for" "it's over" "it's the end" and "we're screwed for ever".

All because "Krokodil Gena has come to stay."

There's a fair amount of background info required to fully appreciate the full gravity of these statements. Three main points:

1) They were part of one long speech said by gruff blue overalls workman man. He seems to be the general handy-man for my block of the accommodation. He always wears blue overalls. He is often in the kitchen smoking or frying potatoes or (multitasking) smoking and frying potatoes. Up until Tuesday I would occasionally say hello to him, and he once shouted at me for opening the window in the kitchen which was making a draught so I shouted back and told him it wasn't me that opened it. Otherwise he's generally rather taciturn; more than 5 words per contact with person/hour's conversation is a clear marker of extraordinary circumstances. Let alone a full on speech.

2) What had happened so far that morning:

-I slept through my alarm. I sleepily wandered through to the kitchen with some rubbish to put down the rubbish chute and with my saucepan of porridge. I opened the rubbish chute and there was sitting an ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE RAT. So I shoved him down with my rubbish and shut the door again, and put my porridge on the hob to slowly and sleepily simmer over what had just happened. Then gruff blue overalls workman man comes in to the kitchen with a hammer in one hand and a glass jar in the other and crouches by the door...

3) Krokodil Gena: a favourite Soviet cartoon character from the cartoon "Cheburashka"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKaRb28b0NU (crocodile)

Must see. A choice cultural reference albeit strange point of comparison for said rat.

So gruff blue overalls workman man rails off while smashing the glass all over the floor with the hammer. I stand in my flipflops watching him wondering what on earth he's doing and continue stir my porridge. It's quickly clear that his long monologue is about new rat infestation which is immune to poison (!) and which has been breeding and has come in to the rubbish chute to shelter from this:

first proper snow - view from my window last Sunday morning

Then he took a brush and brushed all the broken glass into a little hole under the door - i.e. little ratty hole (so, all clear what he was actually doing).

Since then we have been bonding over how much the rats are cunning and evil little bastards. His glass thing was a complete waste of effort they cleared it away no problem and we have bonded over both monitoring this process. Also, since the chitchat takes place in the kitchen, it has extended to laddish subjects such as the relative benefits of the size and shape of my kettle.

hot conversation

I like how he never actually said the word "rat". I've heard about peasants who live in Russian forests and who never call bears bears as it's bad luck or something. They refer to them as "the landlord" or "Ivan Ivanovich" or general things along those lines, apparently. Nice story anyway, and it seems this is the skanky city version.

These events have also given rise to another little collection of Persian animal names.

Khar in Persian means 'ass' (or 'donkey') or can just be a prefix meaning 'big' in a few compound animal names. Two of these I think are definitely blogworthy, however you translate them...

Goosh in Persian means 'ear', moosh='mouse'

Rabbit = khar goosh

Rat = khar moosh

Lolz.

That's all for now on the donkey mouse infestation. As for the donkey mouses themselves I haven't seen any since tues but I bang on the rubbish chute door now before opening it, and occasionally hear them rustling and squeaking. I live near the kitchen but I'm optimistic that my farts have kept them at bay thus far.

Next thing on this post is The Sudden Arrival of The Cold Weather I'd Been Waiting For, and Subsequent Second Thoughts

The snow from Saturday night/Sunday day (ie that picture above) lasted a couple of days and was stuck to everything like icing. Very pretty and put me in a great mood. We also had thick fog that froze over everything and covered everything in ice. It all felt quite ominous, the fog was very low hanging and you couldn't see much which I guess is pretty normal really for when it's foggy and that's probably why they say that fog is ominous.

Then everything melted and was just grey from Wed to the next Sat (this one just gone). On Saturday evening the temperature dropped about 6 or 7 degrees to minus 5. It was cold walking home on Saturday night. During the night it got down to minus 10 and a real chilly wind picked up. I was slow to realise the seriousness of this and went for a jog in shorts on Sunday and got very pink knees and a shocking case of willy-shrink.

also this has been happening when I go outside:

For some reason the response to this plummet in temperature was that on Sunday morning the heating went off in my side of the building. My windows are a bit draughty, I thought of cling filming them but didn't get round to it. The temp continued to drop - was minus 15 overnight and minus 13 in the day. So last night I had a shivery sleep in my hoody and thick socks and sleeping bag under my duvet and felt pretty frrreessshh this morning as I ate my steaming porridge. It was cold enough for breath to do the steamy condensationy dragon breath thing inside my room and condensation froze on the inside of the inside window of my double glazing.

Once I got outside on the way to class it was a beautiful crisp clear morning and stayed clear and sunny all day, the first bit of sun in over a week, not a cloud in the sky apart from huge billows of condensation cloud hitting the cold air from factory chimneys dotted over the city skyline. Down at the metro I looked out onto the Moscow river. It is freezing in big sheets of ice from the edges in and the was steaming like a not very enticing hot tub.

When I returned this evening I actually laughed out loud a little (deranged as that may sound) when I found that the heating has been turned on. I found that my cabbage which was by the window overnight has frozen solid:

weapon.

and my smetana (the tasty creme fraiche I eat with pretty much everything) which was in my between-the-windows-fridge has turned into quite a nice kind of frozen yoghurt.

With a warm room now though I feel ready for anything and could happily get used to this proper cold winter, especially as I'm planning not to linger on for the slush in spring.

All in all rats and cold have been a good opportunity to have a good chat with the people who live in my block, and have provided entertainment and distraction. (Although my neighbour who is gently freezing with a draughty hole in his wall seems to have turned to drink!)

Otherwise life trundles on as usual and busy as ever with work, studying, cooking things like cabbage, and all the out and about stuff that make up big city life and the emgay ooo good times!

Hope you're all well, all my love.

The End of The Beginning and The Beginning of The End

+

=

I'm feeling pretty tired and my homework is doing my head in so while I wait for my macaronis (chakaronis) to boil it seems an opportune moment to kick back and post a new and well overdue nugget of moscow blogglington.

So put on your safety bloggles and prepare for another little trip through snowy wastes, past barking dogs and funky car alarms, to the humble little abode of Yours Truly and my trusty sidekick Glen, the one off of post number 1.

Weather or not you're interested

After promises since August that this is going to be the coldest winter ever according to indisputable scientifically proven meteorological true facts, on Monday it was still stubbornly 13 degrees C outside and I was a bit sweaty (a detail for the ladies). Here are some stimulating (mildly interesting/relevant) statistics:

"Russia is experiencing an unusually warm November, with four temperature records set in Moscow this month.

The capital reached a temperature of 12.3C on Monday, breaking the previous record of 11.7C set in 1923.

Meteorologists say temperatures have hovered around 10C above normal, due to warm air moving north from southern parts of Europe. The average temperature for this time of year is just 1.1C."

and, most importantly,

"The high temperatures have caused problems for wildlife according to ecologists. Hedgehogs and badgers have been unable to go into hibernation, while some species of red squirrel have not changed into their white winter coats."

The poor red squillies!

So the upshot of all this is that for those of you who hadn't guessed yet that stuff back in October about snow and bears roaming the streets, although partly true, was mostly bollocks.*

However, from 12 degrees on Monday it dropped to zero today plus wind and the latest is that it's going down another twelve for next Tuesday. So maybe my sweaty cynicism is a bit premature. It is still only mid November after all. Better get ma long johns on!

The next exciting piece of news is that Ostrich in Persian is camel-chicken! I've already told some people this in my excitement so if you're one of them and it's not news to you just chill your beans and skip this bit. If you study Persian you may say "Nay, it can also be translated as camel-bird" but firstly nay is what horses say and secondly camel-bird doesn't sound as good in my opinion. In Russian ostrich is strauss. Dunno why. Did Mr Strauss discover ostriches or did the first ostrich discovered look like him?

Apart from the fact that I'm not doing my dull and boring homework for tomorrow, and aside from exciting animal discoveries, my studies are going pretty well. In any case, whether they're going well or not is not really relevant to anyone, as basically whatever progress or not I am making I am a convenient tool to spur on my Russky peers either by the old prod "look how well mark is doing and he doesn't even know russian" or booster "look how badly mark is doing and he's from cambridge which is supposed to be good, well done, keep it up, he can't handle it here". This weekend I am entering myself into the all Russia Persian olympiad which will take place on 22nd and 23rd January 2011 so look out for me on the International BBC sports headlines as I wrestle my opponents to the ground.

I've not only been studying. My English teaching has been fun and "rewarding" although pretty tiring. My rich kids have gone off to the UK to have a stab at the common entrance, and today I almost took on some more refugees but I'm going to think about that because I don't actually have much time. I've also got myself a decent night job at a top secret nuclear bunker 60 metres beneath the ground:

my night time call-centre job at the Top Secret Nuclear Bunker

So, I've got a proper niche going on. I have some friends now and I know my way around pretty well, I even show Russian people to places. I've now thought I've finished with bureaucracy at least three times, so I won't say that again, as no doubt the time will come again to stand in another queue or two to take a piece of paper to tell one office in this building something from another office which they obviously couldn't have just told each other. But I have managed to set up my accommodation til the end of Jan for a haggled fee (kaching!), and my visa is being extended. My inter-window fridge is fully functional. I find it harder and harder to work out what is weird or hard or menacing or foreign about Moscow life, and now that I have Marmite, Lea and Perrin's and Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade from some generous friends, not to mention a hefty bottle of Scotch for when it really gets cold, apart from occasional late night longings for bacon it's difficult to remember what I missed so much about England to start with.

happy chappy

Obviously within reason though, because I will always miss my friends and family (gotta keep my readers sweet!) (joke, I do actually miss you!), but I mean the place. So it's the end of the beginning. The middle, really. And as such also...

The Beginning of the End of ma emgay ooo good times!

How and when this Russia bit of my year abroad ends depends on the beginning of the Iran bit. You could even say that the whole year will end up a bit of a weird hybrid linguistic ostrich (linguostrich) made up of camelrussia and chickenran. Sorting out the Iran bit has been another of my main occupations over the past months. I'm relatively confident I should get there eventually, and I'm hoping for early 2011. There's also a high chance now that I'm back in the UK for an as yet indefinite period of time from the end of January.

So much for what's past and what looms on the horizon. In the longer term, I've not made my investments on pots, pans, rugs, accommodation, work, a working timetable. Now, life is hectic and spontaneous, squeezed between lessons and homework, and firmly rooted in the present. I busy myself with meeting people of different ages and backgrounds and exploring different parts of the city and its population. I'm fortunate, as a poor student from an educated background doing a weird subject can mix with pretty much anyone -from Central Asian refugees to Naval Attaches- and I'm eager to get the most out of this. Moscow's an exhilarating place to live and I'm jogging to keep up. Life now is characterised by involuntary little smiles, as when I jog through the birch woods, the moonlight glinting off the leafy carpet, listening to the wolf-like howling of stray dogs, or, further down along the embankment of dilapidated concrete slabs, city lights glinting off lapping ripples, a lone workman welding on his makeshift platform.

*there had, in fact, been a couple of snowstorms, and there were also a couple of big fat old bears dressed in people clothes who came to visit me from England

Lady Clare Planting Her Flag

This blog is now feeding into a parrallel, more general archive by and about Clareites (ie people from Clare College Cambridge) Abroad.

So any current Clareites and alumni reading this now, definitely have a look at the new online colonialist drive that's kicking off over at wordpress. Any time you go on holiday, take a year out, get a travel grant etc. it would be good to hear from you on there.

It's all for the good cause of furthering Lady Clare's enterprise of World Domination as part of a long and worthy British Tradition. (In the hope that in the long run we all turn out like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BKRZTalEys, because that would be funny.)

In any case, it bears explaining quickly that the whole colonialist theme arises solely from the fact that Clare College has a place up on Chesterton Lane called "The Colony", which provided a neat name for the abroad blog, and a good opportunity to put up a bit of Eddie Izzard and The Fast Show on this one.

Lots of love,

Mark

Begemotizm

Begemot = hippo in Russian. from Behemoth. Begemotizm = eating ridiculous amounts of food. Arrived in St Petersburg yesterday morning on the train in time for an extended four hour breakfast on the balcony of pancakes, potato pancakes, home-made banana milkshake, bread and cheese, apple pie, fried potatoes, some biscuits, a bit of cake, then a nap, up in time for lunch, then some afternoon tea, then a stroll down into town to meet an old friend for a snack, then a couple of beers, warming mulled wine, another good friend popped by, then I came home for some supper.

Taming the Beast, Clowning Around

After a heavy and exhausting week last week, and a scare about a roommate just when I was feeling all settled (scared them more so have preserved my pimpin solitude), I gently collapsed over the weekend and had a nice domestic time regenerating all strung up with drying washing. Also tried out the chair lift on the hills which was fun, counting the weddings and stray dogs which seem to gather in equal number around the view point at weekends. Since then this week has had quite a perky kind of buzz about it. The weather has been cold and crisp and clear, hard frosts over night and sunny days.

Sunday night - Spooky barbecue in spooky wood.

We went for a spooky barbecue in spooky wood. A successful induction session for my grill set involving lots of lighter fluid and grilled meats.

Monday night - Mission Cake Bake Bake Cake

This was two of Cambridge's greatest Moscow representatives teaming up for an evening of culinary concoctification. Since success is a subjectively defined social construct I would say it was a very successful endeavour, although I have also on occasions been subjectively described by certain third parties as a delusional optimist.

Armed with tin and various ingredients and snacks to keep us going through the cooking process, Charles (Russianist from Jesus College Cam at the history faculty here) and I set off in search of working oven, since mine doesn't have a handle on the door and his doesn't have a knob to turn the gas on. We went up to floor number 8. Couple of near misses with the gas oven explosion wise - ooh er - and lots of whisk-y fun (see last post). The cake was a bit of a cobbledy jobby. We just had eggs and flour and sugar and some frozen fruit to chuck in it, and decided it needed a bit of baking soda or yeast or something (last baking experiment was stodge). So we plied the mix with beer (bubbly logic) to try to get a rise out of it. But alas yon cake proved resistant to our tried and tested seduction tactics and despite all efforts the result was really remarkably dense.

The whole point in all of this was that it was Jo's 21st - Cambridge Moscow Uni resident numero 3.

So we stabbed some candles in our creation and blew up a couple of balloons and set of for Sektor G, as it was by now just past midnight so birthday time. We got a couple of funny looks from security. Lit all the candles (there were loads, cake turned into mini forest fire) and banged on what we thought was Jo's door. Sleepy grumpy looking Russian guy emerged so we moved on to the next door sharpish. Banged on it. Jo emerged. Mission Accomplished.

Tuesday night - Georgian food

It was yummy, especially the pumpkin dumplings, and we got free wine at the end. A success whichever way you look at it.

Wednesday night (tonight) - Circus!

Fantastic circus, I'm ruined now for any kind of petty acrobatics and if I ever had appreciated the skill required in training dogs for dog shows then now I definitely wouldn't. Lions (both sea- and normal big catty maney african ones), magic tricks, trapeze, nail biting balancing acts, bears driving motorbikes, funny clowns. And of course the stodgy cementy birthday cake made an appearance as a filling interval snack. Basically, it had it all. To dispel any squeamish hesitation about the ethics of what discipining animals to such a high level must involve, the Russian response I received was that the animals are kept in good order, fed, and ruled with an iron rod so obviously much happier, healthier and more successful than if they were struggling with chaotic freedom in their wild (natural?) habitat. A theoretical viewpoint which sounds strangely familiar.

Thursday night (soon) - off to St Petersburg for a long weekend. Looking forward to getting on a train off to see old friends. But also glad to feel - delusional optimism aside - that I can now leave the Moscow I've been arduously carving and digging a niche into, nail and tooth, since the end of August, and to come back on Monday to my niche all ready carved and dug and furnished and ready for the winter.