A busy weekend this weekend, I'm going to have to explain it without pictures, accidentally ended up in the internet cafe so I don't have my camera with me, I'll have the pictures to go with the story in the next few days, promise! We went out for halloween on Saturday (in a city of 15 million people the nightlife is dead on a monday!), when a night starts with a cheerleader, an angel, a masked fencer, a cowboy and zorro (complete with horse's head on a stick that neighs when you squeeze its ear) in a metro, wearing their best 'this is what I wear every day' faces, it's never going to be normal. We started in the local Irish pub (our choice had nothing to do with the fact that they were offering free cocktails to everyone in a costume) where we were joined by Lui, dressed as a hula dancer, and Anna, dressed as a tiger (furry tiger print shorts...with a tail, a tiger hat affair and a tiger cape, it actually worked) and some becostumed americans. Lui had to review a club, so Anna (dressed as a tiger) and two of our friends (dressed as themselves) went with him. For the entirety of this story you have to remember that Lui, the serious journalist, was only dressed in a grass skirt, boxers, and cheap flowery garlands. But it didn't matter, because everywhere in Moscow was having a costume night on Saturday, weren't they?? Anyhoo, the tiger, the hula dancer, the russian and the american, all well inebriated as a result of the toxic free cocktails from the irish pub rolled up to the club. It had only just opened and hadn't advertised all that well so they were the only patrons, and looking around, it appeared that there was a definite female majority in the room and nobody else was wearing a costume. On closer inspection, the topless dancers and unimpressed prostitutes all wearing matching blode wigs in the room might point toward the fact that the club that Lui had been sent to review was in fact a brothel. This view was reinforced when Lui hoola-d downstairs for the tour of the 'VIP' area, complete with beds and porn on the tv....nice! Still haven't read his review but apparently its very hard to disguise the fact that most people who go to this particular club do very little dancing, Lui had to look elsewhere for his luau!
For the rest of us non-brothel patrons we waited in well below zero temperatures to be allowed into a club by the SOLDIERS who were on the door, they take their face control very seriously here! When we eventually got in, if the many many pictures are anything to go by, the horse on a stick took over, it ended up wearing one of my sparkly pompoms as a wig and pestered the entire club. You just cant bring stuffed animals on sticks anywhere these days... (pic of the offending animal to follow!)

I got an i pod for my birthday recently and am busy stuffing it with songs. One of the beauties of this country is there are no piracy laws so there are huge big warehouses legally selling pirated cds and dvds. Blithely ignoring the sticker saying 'dont steal music' on the i pod, we went out to the cd market and splurged on mp3s. You can get an artist's entire back catalogue for about 3 euro, if you buy more, you can haggle (the key is, never ever look like you actually intend to buy the product....ever!) Between 3 of us we spent 40 euro and got about 100 albums, love this country!!

The granny of a very good friend of ours here died earlier in the week so we decided to go to the funeral to show our support. He met us and brought us to the funeral home, then disappeared. Because he was organising the funeral we assumed there was something he had to do. So when people started to walk into the chapel we followed them in, covering our heads as we went in. It was an open casket so myself and anna really didn't want to look, I'd never met the woman, didn't really want to see her in death. There we were, best solemn funeral faces on, when Lui motioned for us to go back outside, I thought he just wanted to leave the family to it, it was only when we got outside that he said that if it was the funeral of Oleg's granny, it really shouldn't be a man in the casket! We managed to gatecrash the wrong funeral and the ceremony we were supposed to be at was just finishing up next door. Lesson learnt today, if you absolutely should not laugh, under any circumstances,its the hardest thing in the world to hold it in! We swiftly exited stage left after the funeral party departed for the cemetary, feeling slightly sheepish and deciding that Russian funerals weren't for us!