LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW!!!!!

It snowed today, real proper big flakes of snow and we crunched and slid our way into college, all excited about the prospect of a white winter, it snowed heavily all day, the city looks amazing covered in snow. Imagine our disgust this evening when we left the warm cafe that makes great sandwiches (an unfortunate rarity in this city) to see that it was raining!! Our snow was melting, meeeeellllllting!However we have been reliably informed that we will be well and truly
sick of snow by mid-december and what were we getting so excited about. It's definitely still a novelty for this girl from a temperate climate! This is the view from my bedroom window this morning, even our local building site manages to look festive!!

Chilling out in college, my ass is still defrosting! Spot the hardcore Russian without a hat!

The Big Move....Maybe.

We have found ourselves an apartment, within walking distance of town and college and five minutes from the nearest metro stop (which happens to be two stops up from college, not that we won't be powerwalking into college everyday!) It's got three big rooms, a piano (ooh, fancy!), a bath, a washing machine (a luxury item that I never even considered a luxury until I moved to this country, handwashing everything is the biggest pain in the ass ever!), a big telly, one of the biggest fridge/freezer combo's I've seen this side of the atlantic (or the pacific, depending on what direction you feel like travelling!), BROADBAND INTERNET, an oven (see entry on luxury items above) and a general lack of babushka's. So after living in the same house for 20 years I find myself getting ready to move for the second time in two months....the monster suitcases make an appearance again! Though the path to living in an apartment in this country is never smooth, of course they like to keep you on your toes. For a start the prospective tenant, not the landlord who's making all the money, has to pay the agent a finders fee for about an hours work. This can be as much as 1 months rent, when we are going to be paying 1000 dollars a month for the privilege of staying in the place, it cuts deep to fork over hundreds of dollars on top of that. Also, having told the agency that we will take the flat and are willing to move in right away, they told us they would ring us back to organise a time to sign the relevant documents (along with the ubiquitous stamps that go on everything here, documents, restaurant menus, even bed linen, if you stand still long enough you'll end up getting stamped!) and we still haven't heard from them. I've never heard of a letting agent playing hard to get like that, we've got the dollars burning holes in our pockets, just let us move in!!! The moving trauma updates will continue...

A High Class Evening

We pretended that we were cultured for an evening last night and spent the evening in the Bolshoi Theatre. Anna and Lui bought me tickets to see the opera 'Tosca', sung in Italian, with Russian captions, which was great for the 2 out of the 6 of us who can speak fluent Russian, for the rest of us it meant a crash course in operatic Russian, but the whole show was amazing. We even got the tiny little opera glasses and pretended that the view was better with them, I wasn't people watching with them...honest! Its amazing how people can be tortured and killed and still manage to sing in perfect pitch at the same time! The Bolshoi theatre itself is being renovated at the mo so we were in the temporary building.....which for a stop-gap was amazing, blinged up with chandeliers and general fanciness. We are definitely going to be returning, have to see the ballet, where better to see the Nutcracker than in Tchaikovsky's home country? That didn't sound pretentious at all...did it?