I don't know if this will come out properly but this is Sinead, standing by an extension cable that is coming from the sky, lying in the middle of the street. We weren't sure where it was plugged in or what the person who had left it there was planning to plug into it. The mind boggles...


Three classic examples of the 'metro face', a necessary survival tool in Moscow. Always look vaguely annoyed and distinctly unapproachable, don't make eye contact and for god's sake don't even think of smiling, you may have just agreed to marry someone!


Catherine, fresh from the provinces, hadn't really grasped the concept of the 'metro face' just yet. She's now engaged to an Azeri street trader and working with him selling onions.

I tried to take a few pics of the many Dunnes bags moseying about Moscow but people look at you very strangely when you start taking pictures of their plastic bag!!

Dunnes Stores bags in Moscow.....Whaddya mean there's no Dunnes Stores here???

So after you've spent, oh about a week in Moscow, you notice the abundance of Dunnes Stores bags around the place, imagine the ensuing excitement, finally somewhere to buy affordable but good quality underwear, food and assorted other consumer goods, god bless Ben's Boutiques, they really are everywhere. Then imagine the crushing disappointment when you realise that there is not a single Dunnes anywhere in Moscow, or in the rest of the great country that is Russia but that the Dunnes Stores 'bag for life' and hilarious knock-offs of it ('Flower Stores' anyone??) are the bags of choice for the discerning Muscovite about town. You see Russia copped on to the beauty of charging for bags long before the powers that be in our fair isle cottoned on to the fact that there was money to be made for it. Also Russians don't believe in carrying a rucksack or any type of big functional bag when they can use a perfectly good natty plastic number. So its very common to see assorted babushkas standing around metro stations and markets with armfuls of plastic bags, the most common of which is the Dunnes one (though there have been sightings of River Island, Selfridges and a Londis (!) bag!) This raises a number of questions: do we have to start carrying our lives around in plastic bags to avoid standing out like the decadent westerners that we are trying not to be? Why on earth has the Dunnes Stores bag been chosen as the prestigious bag to be seen with? Is someone actually making them or are they falling off the back of a lorry on the way to Ireland? What happens when the 'bag for life' breaks and, according to the promise on the bottom of the bag, if it is taken to any Dunnes Stores outlet it will be replaced, free of charge? There will be a national scandal, all these babushkas looking for the shop to replace their bag and unfortunately they won't find one, trust me, I've looked!!

Women have to cover their heads before they go into orthodox churches, (why hair is offensive
I have no idea) this is Anna doing her best pious Mother Theresa impression!


This is the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, it looks pretty fancy and old, it may be fancy, its not old! The first one was built in 1839-83 to commemorate Russia's victory over Napoleon. Stalin in his infinite wisdom decided to destroy it and build a 315m high 'Palace of Soviets' with a 100m statue of Lenin (there really isn't enough references to Lenin in this country!) but after they knocked it down they ran out of money so they decided to put the world's largest heated outdoor swimming pool in the crater of the holy site instead, as you do! They rebuilt it recently, finishing it in 1997, in the space of two years, it looks quite impressive from far away but on the inside, even though all the wall space is covered in icons and religous images (they are big into decoration in Orthodox churches, not big into seats OR short and sweet ceremonies) they are all mass produced and the church just doesn't feel used. Interesting story behind it though, would have loved to have seen the pool there, especially when it's -18 degrees outside!
This was the view from my window this morning, very randomly it was colder in Dublin the other day than it was in Moscow, I'm sure thats not supposed to happen, at least not in November! We got our snow last night and this morning it was snowing heavily on our way to the metro station, when we got off the metro, ten minutes later, there wasn't a flake to be had, no fresh snow had fallen and we were only a few miles away! It didn't snow all day in the centre and it's still snowing out in our neck of the woods, very strange!

Today is Thanksgiving so in true American stylee we are stuffing ourselves with traditional pilgrim food....rashers, sausages and pudding that Catherine's (one of the Trinity girls in Saratov) parents brought over for us. They also brought us out to dinner last night where we ate ridiculous amounts of indian and georgian food so I'd like to profess my undying love and admiration for them both.

Sinead and Catherine are up from Saratov with us for the week, they can't get over how expensive Moscow is. They both had birthdays while they were here with us, so did two of our other European Studies friends, Siobhan in Salamanca and Gui Xi in Strasbourg, whats with all the third week of November babies on our course???

This is the entrance to our new gaff....honestly it is, marble staircases are so now. Its so hard to get good help to hoover the carpet though!


This is my room, complete with chandelier number two (one is never enough dahling!) Its interesting to note that even though the walls are very thick and its an old building, I can hear the man next door, a total stranger that I've never even seen, snoring gently every night! (This pic is especially for you Ciara, sorry it took so long!)


This is our kitchen radio. It has only one station. The government channel. Almost all of the ads start with 'dear pensioners'. Oh dear.


This is our kitchen, complete with soviet stylee oven (it works, thats all that matters!!), surpisingly low sink and a red scrubbing brush with a suction cup on it, clearly a must-have purchase from IKEA!


This is our bullet-proof, fully padded double front door(love the dodgy marble paint effect!). Not entirely sure why there's a safety chain, to use it you would have to open the first door, then open the outer door, swiftly close the first door and slide the chain across ensuring that whoever was trying to break into your flat would be in the kitchen, boiling the kettle for a cup of tea and rooting for biscuits at that stage! Clearly the horse had to make the move from our previous abode, she doubles as a bouncer for undesirable guests! Note also that we've turned Russian and all shoes are shed at the door, we maintain its so the wooden floors don't get damaged, we just don't fancy getting the hoover out!


This is Anna's room, complete with bedside table that she assembled herself!

This is Anna studying in our living room/Lui's room, it was the night before the fateful test! Yes that is a chandelier you see hanging from the ceiling, we are decadent westerners after all!!


Lessons learnt by the occupants of number 57 Konstantin Simonov Street (thats us!) in the past few days....
1. If you try to run the washing machine and the kettle at the same time, it blows a fuse and all power is lost in the apartment, though inexplicably this doesnt happen with any other combination of appliances.
2. Having people over for a quiet dinner on a thursday night won't end any time before 5am the next morning, not good when there is work and college to stay awake in!
3. You may live close to the metro, this does not mean the the metro has the ability to travel at warp speed just because you left ten minutes after you are supposed to be in town! (We are embracing the Russian philosophy that you aren't technically late until you are 9 minutes late, not sure who came up with that number....we are often technically late here!)
4. We live beside the motorway where Liam Lawlor met the great tribunal in the sky.
5. Surprise history tests, this time on Russian history, written in scrawled Russian lecturer handwriting and being the same test as the Russian students had to take (they can speak russian, so not fair!) are very easy to fail. We got praised for getting 2 out of 10 questions right, Lui got 4 out of 10, the boy can do no wrong in this country!
6. We live upstairs from relatives of Mikhail Gorbachev, we have to be careful when we have people over, the last thing we need to do is piss off a former leader's family.

We are the only people complaining about the lack of snow in Moscow, apparently we have been having unseasonably good weather, it rained yesterday for the first time in weeks but we want snow dammit!

I know I've been slacking on the post front, I'll try to improve, promise! I've been busy with the new flat, it had to be christened, so far I've managed to explode most of a bottle of sovetskoe champagnskoe all over Lui's rug (that the landlady later took for her own house...oops!), smashed a 3/4 full bottle of perfume so my bedroom now smells of chanel chance and I don't and spilt a glass of water everywhere...I'm hoping thats the third and last one! We are just over a week in our little pied-a-terre (I'm not entirely sure what that is but it sounds fancy!) and the student accomodation and its narky babs are but a distant memory. The only reason we MIGHT miss them is that we now have to empty our own bins and buy our own toilet paper (evro standart....clearly the creme de la creme of papers for the discerning derriere!) The bad thing about being only twenty minutes from college is that we still manage to be 10 minutes late on a good day, the teleporter is on order though so that should cut down on our commute time. Another trip to IKEA was quite clearly called for to make our bachelor(ette) pad more homely but that place is just dangerous.....clearly I needed to buy 8 colouredy boxes that all fit into each other, thanks Josh for talking me off the ledge for that one. Even when you leave the place, complete with food coma from the yummy cheap swedish food, slightly light-headed from the pour your own draft beer tap(friends don't let friends IKEA when drunk!) , lots of assorted furnishings that are all so cheap separately but suddenly seem to add up when you get them to the checkout and leaving behind the colouredy boxes, the Swedes still catch you out...I definitely paid for a jumbo packet of candles that never came home, still making a profit out of me, this is war IKEA!

I had a ridiculously surreal experience the other week, a two hour conversation, with a Ukrainian (nothing too weird there) in IRISH!! So random, the guy teaches Irish in Moscow State University and he asked me to go talk to his students who were very excited that they would get to talk to a native speaker. So I ended up on the campus on MSU the other day, two enthusiastic girls (the advanced class!) sitting across from me waiting for me to dust off my rusty Irish. These two girls who had never left Russia spoke with very strong Connemara accents when they spoke Irish, sounding remarkably like my biology teacher, they are reading 'Peig', 'Na hOileainigh' and 'Caisleain Oir'!! Most of those books mean nothing to non Irish speakers but the last one is particularly painful for anyone from Scoil Chatriona who's sat through a whole year of Seimi and Babai Mhairtin! Anyhoo, I think I've been roped into meeting with them every few weeks to speak Irish with them, its so surreal here though because I'm speaking Russian all day when I try to speak Irish its a weird slavic version! Definitely a very interesting experience having a conversation in Irish on the Metro, with the Muscovites, who love a good one-way staring competition, shooting you daggers wondering what weird language you are speaking and who let you into their country.

Myself and Anna discovered today, to our dismay/giddy amusement, that even when you are allowed to use a dictionary and your class 'notes', the teacher leaves the room for the duration of the 1h and 20 minute class and there is much conferring and strangely identical answers that it is still possible to spectacularly fail an exam! We had our first exam today, in the subject that myself and Anna have a tutorial in on our tods cos we're special, so it was just us sitting in the room. The sad thing is we were being examined on the french, american and british revolutions, WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THEM!! Looking back over the 'notes' we had taken in the lectures expecting them to be clear, concise and loaded with interesting titbits of information that were guaranteed to get score us extra points and the undying respect of our lecturer, we found lists of vocabulary and incoherent ramblings vaguely related to history. So it was good news that I now know the russian for 'to sneeze' and 'livestock' but they were not going to cut the mustard come exam time. To make it worse, the exam style here is different to home, with history in Trinity they aren't too concerned about whether or not you know the date when something happened, just as long as you know the series of events and why they happened. Of course, this being Russia, they have to be different, they want to know the date, time of day and whether it rained that day (well not really that detailed but you know what I mean!) So after resisting the impulse to either run from the room or hide in the surprisingly large wardrobe in the corner, we settled in to making up some history, what do you mean the french revolution wasnt entirely based around cake??? Should get the results next week, seeing as the answers were practically identical I hope the grades will be too!

Why Fiona, is that a lease you've just signed after a soul-destroying search through the dark underbelly of the Moscow real estate world?? Funny you should ask, it is! We finally found somewhere to live, that doesnt involve furnishing it ourselves, living almost halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg or exorbitant rent. We signed the contract on Saturday and moved in about an hour later, thank god we have moved out of the student accomodation. Our new gaff is practically palatial in comparison. Its very soviet chic, with an antique cooker and fridge and our very own meat grinder should we feel the need, A WASHING MACHINE (our clothes are clean again, happy days!), three big rooms, a doorbell that sounds like a bird and no less than three loud phones! I'll have more info soon, I'm running out of time cos I took too long putting pics on!




The boots that are keeping my tootsies warm in the snow here, no teddy bears were harmed in the making of this footwear!!




Our old washing machine, neither Lui nor a spin cycle included!! (tried to turn the pic, no response from the computer!)


The horse loses the run of itself with its new fancy hair and has to be reined in by its previously masked handler!
The first appearance of the horse that terrorised the club on halloween, it hasn't gained its fetching 'do just yet.

Iris practices her best metro face (whaddya mean my halo's slipping!) on halloween, Eric is being chalked by a masked fencer....don't ask.

Lui 'I'm a serious journalist and I'm here to review your gentlemens club' Smyth and Anna 'I've got a tail this evening' Bloxham. ( I tried to rotate the pic but the computer's not cooperating!) It should also be remembered that it was around -8 degrees in Moscow that night!

Our new washing machine.....look at how pretty and functional it is, our clothes were definitely NOT getting any cleaner and our jeans fit again, we are happy bunnies!!

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!