bethyslittleblog: Autumn

Hello :)
So, after a week of winter, autumn decided to make an appearance in St Peteys making it a very pretty place indeed. Last week was a bit wobbly, including a cash machine trying to eat my card, a pigeon hitting me in the head (no word of a lie!) and ended at quite the low point when we managed to miss our night-train to Moscow, this was very VERY frustrating, more-so because of the queuing this involved. So, before I start my little rant, I'll just say this - I was warned about some aspects of Russian culture, like for example customer service, but thought 'hey, it can't be that bad, I'll see for myself', and now, my friends, I have seen it for myself. Firstly, we went to print our tickets at the machine, (as you would in England, lovely lovely) but this failed, so we had to join a queue to sort out our tickets, we queued for a good half an hour and it was getting very very close to the time the train was leaving, so I quickly ran over to a woman at an information desk and explained the situation, she then sent me to another queue, where I was told to go back to the first queue. Fun. Got to the front just in time but were told we had the wrong booking number, and were sent to another queue, sorted this out, but had missed the train by this point so had to join another queue to refund tickets, and then another queue, la la la (you get the gist right?) all in all, we were sitting in a coffee house at 3am deciding what to do.

But, it all ends happily. We made it to Moscow on Friday morning and had such a good time. Made friends with the people we shared a cabin with on the journey (oh yes, this was second class, the return journey was third class with no such luxury as a cabin, just shelves to sleep on), the lady we met loved talking about Prince Harry (Garry in Russian!) and asked me if I thought he was on drugs, interesting, she also said that it was a shame her son was married as she would've liked him to marry a young English girl, ha.

Moscow is a beautiful city (obviously not St Peteys though!), or at least the bits of it that we saw (didn't get to go inside the Kremlin because Putin was having a ceremony for the olympic torch, sad times), my favourite bit by far was inside St Basil's Cathedral, as well as the huge market we found which sold absolutely everything, including lots of old soviet antiques, giant samovars and bear coats. Also got to see a light show on the Bolshoy Theatre building, was absolutely stunning.

This week has been pretty busy, done lots of teaching and lessons as per, also found ourselves in Ikea again (this has got to stop). Yesterday we went to a little town called Pushkin with a Russian girl I met, was basically a lovely autumny land and was fun to wander around. Russians seem to love making giant crowns out of leaves (and I don't mean the children - the majority of people doing this were adults!) which must be some sort of tradition, it's quite a strange site seeing so many people with these hats on as you're strolling along!

Today we went to an ice-hockey match, was a lot of fun, CКА vs Vladivostok, and I definitely learned a lot of new words from the man next to me who was not best pleased about how СКА (St Petes) were playing! They lost 3-1 in the end but i'd love to go back and see them win some time!

On the Babushka front all is well, we're having lots of nice conversations and getting less told off than ever before. However, if you'd asked me mid-week how things were I would've had a different story to tell; Wednesdays drama included her leaving the house and blanking us when we walked past her in the street, whoopsies, and yesterday we were fed what some would call porridge, but oh my, it wasn't good, not good at all.

Hope you've had a nice week and that your babushka is treating you well,
Here are lots of photos to make up for the lack of blog last week,
Lots of love,
Лиза