I should change the name of the blog to dublinfi now because, despite the best efforts of russian bureaucracy, we all made it home in one piece last night. We had a few last minute panics with our visas. when we got our visas back on thursday we realised that the intelligent being who processed them had stamped them SEVEN TIMES (the stamp is all important in Russia!) but had forgotten to actually sign them! So a mosey down to our friendly passport office and three hours of waiting later they finally managed to find the guy who processed them and got him to sign them. We were on our way...or so we thought.

11 o'clock on friday morning, just as we were getting ready to leave for the airport, we realised that our migration cards, seemingly unimportant little bits of paper that you fill out when you enter the country and forget about, were still in college because they had taken them off us on the first day. These cards are ridiculously overimportant if you ever feel the need to leave the country. Cue a panicked dash into college to be told that they couldn't find them and that they were only a formality anyway (without formalities and needless paperwork Russia wouldn't be able to function!!) Anyhoo, we headed out to the airport, determined to play dumb and priming ourselves to turn on the tears if necessary (shameful I know, but very effective!) First hurdle;overweight bags, solved by checking in seven of us all together and hiding the big pink elephants that were the slightly big-boned bags. Second hurdle; passport control, surprisingly easy for those of us who were without migration cards, still not sure why. Not so easy for sinead who was told that there was a problem with her visa and when she returned with it to Russia she would probably be deported, nice!! They let her through after much humming and hawing and we were on our way!

Once we got to Prague, the quietest airport in the world ever, we were in the EU and nobody could touch us dammit! Arrived in Dublin last night and were dropped into the shameless overconsumerism that is the city at christmastime and the joy of an overstuffed fridge and mammy cooking! Its good to be home. I'll probably be dying to get out of here in about a week...

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

We got our passports back this afternoon and only noticed by accident that the muppet who had processed our visas had managed to stamp it SEVEN times but forgot to actually sign them. So a speedy trip to the passport office and a three hour wait later we got ourselves sorted 15 minutes before the office closed, we'd have been rightly screwed! You gotta love the ridiculously overcomplicated Russian bureacracy!

So I've decided that mocking is catching and I'm not going to say anything about what could go wrong with our flights and just decide that we will be in Dublin at 8.45pm local time tomorrow evening...YAY, roll on Christmas!

So we are due to fly home in slightly over 36 hours and we were informed today, over a week after we surrendered our passports to get our exit and re-entry visa (its a fun process!), that they needed black and white (?) , matte passport pictures yesterday in order to process our visa's in time for our flights. So we are passport-less and visa-less but not worried....yet! I'm sure we could find a turkey in Russia....

We are heading home a week from today, I started thinking about the things that I'm looking forward to and the things I'll miss when I'm home.

Things I'm looking forward to:

• IRISH FOOD!!!!! Mammy food, rashers and sausages, anything involving sun dried tomatoes(ok pedants, I know they aren't Irish but they are just so expensive here!) O'Briens Sandwiches, opening the fridge safe in the knowledge that there will most likely be food of the edible sort there, possibly even a selection, most definitely an improvement on the current situation in my fridge (a sad looking pepper, a long life yoghurt and a block of cheese that promises it won't go off until next june....worrying!!)
• My bed.
  
• Dishwashers!
• Being able to satisfactorily argue in shops and defend my place in queues without being laughed at for my accent.
• Being able to walk down the street without having to stare at the ground, comparatively safe in the knowledge that the worst I'm going to step in is a puddle. Here we've all had a few run-ins with the ice on the footpath, I almost had to grab a few old ladies for support as I skidded past them with all the grace of a baby elephant and we know of a few people here who, painfully for them, hilariously funny for the rest of us, have fallen down open manholes!
• Being able to wear impractical shoes at night time, knowing that there's a pretty low chance of losing a toe to frostbite.
  
• Oh yeah, and seeing my family and friends.....of course!
  

Things I'm going to miss when we are home:

• Being able to hail a car on the side of the road, any car, and preagree the price, usually you can get almost anywhere in the city for about 4 euro. I don't think I can handle the queueing for taxis and watching the meter lark in Dublin!
• Being able to buy a litre of vodka that won't strip your insides for 5 euro (honestly mum, I'm not an alcoholic!)
  
• SNOW!
• My friends, especially our americans who are bailing out and going back to the motherland (or France!) , DONT LEAVE US!!!
• The metro; it may be overheated and overpopulated by fragrantially (its a word!) challenged individuals but its so fast and cheap, Dublin Bus has a long way to go....

Thats it for now, we were supposed to have a politics exam today, our lecturer couldn't stay for it so we didn't have it....nice!

In a further act of procrastination I've just joined bebo, something I swore I'd never do, oh dear. Its a slippery slope, this presentation isn't going to write itself!!

Iris was chosen as the unfortunate victim of the 'tequila boom-boom' shot, her hat says 'help me', shortly after this pic was taken the hat was lit on fire, she was hit on the head with a flaming bat and we could do nothing to help her....we were all on the floor laughing. Iris is currently searching for a chiropractor in the greater Moscow area....

Ok, I'm going to write my presentation now, damn procrastination....

Our 'exams' start on Thursday, the teachers seem like they could be less bothered about them, they are all oral which will entail lots of filler words in Russian and very little actual information. At the moment I'm trying to write a presentation on Alexandr II, a nineteenth century tsar (oh the excitement!) due to a lack of source material (i.e. I was too lazy to actually find anything in the confusing college library, and anyway, its all in Russian!) I'm working off a children's book about the tsars, VERY patchy lecture and tutorial notes and, the saviour of lazy people everywhere, wikipedia. Unfortunately, seeing as I have to be connected to the internet to get Wikipedia, I'm getting easily distracted, like by writing emails, blog posts etc. They have a particularly fine definition of a skanger on wikipedia.com....
Ok, back to work.
Another fascinating weather report...its -1 in Dublin today and +1 in Moscow, whats going on with the world???? Ankle deep slush, soo not conducive to wearing anything you don't want destroyed.

Last Sunday there were elections for the Moscow City Duma, kind of like the city council. The build-up to the elections started back in early October, with the Moscow Times (our only source of english-language news at the moment apart from the internet) running daily articles on the various wheeling and dealing of the parties with parties being excluded from the elections for running blatantly rascist advertisements. Anyhoo, polling day arrived and during our next politics lecture the question was asked how many in our number had voted. In a class of about 45 students, who CHOSE to study politics, only 2 students went to vote...one of them was too late to the polling station so didn't quite manage to cast their vote, the lecturer didn't even bother to vote!! It's good to see that the electorate are flexing their collective muscle in this country!

Finally got another proper fall of snow, makes an improvement on 'black friday' when it was -11 degrees after we had rain and sleet, the roads were like glass and the 5 minute walk to the metro took me about 20 minutes, almost got intimately acquainted with the footpath about 10 times. We now have nice crunchy snow, that your shoes can grip, instead of a walking surface more suited to ice skates!

Just a quick post to say that I had a quick look at the weather in Dublin today....a positively balmy +11 degrees, the temperature in Moscow, a slightly chillier -11 degrees. Winter has arrived!! Josh finally managed to leave the country, we hope!

A Weekend in the West!


The 'Church on Spilt Blood' in Petersburg, cool name and pretty cool looking!

Building an outdoor ice bar on the main street of Petersburg....as one does. You'll notice its dark, quite the running theme for winter in the city!

We were promised that this river, the Neva, would be frozen and that we would be able to walk/skate/ fall on our asses across it at this stage of the year, damn global warming, the Russians love it though because it means their winters are getting much milder, they can't seem to understand it's got slightly more catastrophic results in other parts of the world and keep belching out their pollution. Anyhoo, if it wasn't frozen last weekend we are just going to have to come back after New Year....ho hum!


3.75 Litres of tasty vodka for 30 of your european Euro, when Russia gets it right it does so in style!! (Margaret, I think I've found your spiritual home!!) Honestly lads, it was empty when I found it!!

The birthday boy, a few hours into his night out!!


A weekend trip to St Petersburg was called for in honour of Sean (who does business and Russian in Trinity, but we won't hold that against him), he was hitting the ripe old age of 20 and he came to the shiny metropolis of Moscow for my birthday so my arm was twisted to repay the favour. Had a fantastic weekend, St Petersburg is soo much cheaper than Moscow, spent 250 rubles (about 6 euro) on a night out and that included a trip to KFC AND a taxi for four people home, bargainous! (the cheapness of the night may have had something to do with the MASSIVE bottle of vodka which was opened before we went out...see above) We did the touristy things during the day (which lasted about 4 hours, the sun set at 3:49pm on the sunday) its definitely a prettier city than Moscow. My love of Estonians was confirmed, they speak such a cool language (the number four is 'nelli' so listening to Sean's girlfriend say four thousand four hundred and fourty four was worth the trip alone!) and they are just mad people.

One of our friends, Josh, was leaving to go back to the states for chrismas this afternoon, tearful goodbyes all round and then we got a bit depressed because he was the first of our friends to start the mass christmas exodus. Imagine our surprise when we exited our local metro station this evening to be met by...Josh! After quickly confirming that we hadn't gone back in time, we established that even though Josh had confirmed his flight to Geneva last night, booked his hostel to stay over night there and said goodbye to his babushka (more on her later!) when he went to check in today he was informed that he was in fact booked onto the 9am flight to Zurich and why had he missed it! The beauty of Russia is that in any other country this would have been a major mix-up by the airline and they would bend over backwards to fix it and immediately offer some sort of compensation to allay the pain of missing a flight you never even knew you were booked on, not the case in this fair country. Josh had to traverse the city to try to sort out the problem, all the time being blamed for someone else's mix-up, long story short he's booked on the flight he thought he was booked on, tomorrow, and is staying with us because he can't let his babushka know because heads will roll in the airline industry!

Which leads me nicely to Josh's babushka, or Baba Sasha as she prefers to be called. Not actually his grandmother but more like his roommate/landlord. She spends most of her time with her family in the states so Josh has a pretty sweet deal in the apartment on his own. Yesterday was the first time that we met this living legend, we went to Ismailovsky Park, russian souvenir mecca, and the woman was poetry in motion with her haggling. She managed to disparage almost everything and not only got the Russian price for what we bought (dual pricing, we are never going to be able to get around it) but managed to bully the stallholders into giving further discounts, not easy with these hardcore traders. When she heard that we were Irish she said that she LOVED Riverdance (foolishly, Lui said that he could dance better than Michael Flatley, hands up anyone who doesn't see that coming back to bite him in the ass!!), wondered at why none of us had red hair or freckles and said that she didn't think there were any good looking Irish people (we took it as a compliment!) An absolute legend, we are thinking of bringing her home and putting her on our windowsill!