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!