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!