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???