GOODBYE TVER: The things I'll miss and the things I won't miss...

Part of me can’t believe I’m actually typing this, but... my time in Tver has drawn to end!!  It barely feels like any time at all since I was sat, stressed out in my living room, with all of my clothes sprawled out over the floor in a desperate attempt to pack. I’m currently sat on my bunk bed in Godzilla hostel (Moscow) looking at the pile of suitcases and bags in the corner of the room. I am so excited to be coming home. Beyond excited! My friend Hannah and I can’t help but look at each other and shriek in excitement more or less every ten minutes. There are obviously things that I will be sad to leave behind though, namely the people. I have met some lovely people while I’ve been in Tver and the thought of having said goodbye to them makes me feel all emotional! While I’m yet to fall in love with Russia, my heart belongs to the beautiful friends that I’m leaving behind here.  Thank you so much. You have given me an amazing three months.

Goodbye Flat 24!

I decided that during my last few weeks here, I would do as many things as I could, which is the reason why I haven’t posted in so long. I went ice skating... and fell over spectacularly. Over a week later and my knees still appear to be getting more and more bruised!

I’ve ‘graduated’ from Tver State University!! This was, of course, after sitting numerous surprise exams; being told about them either on the day or the day before! Luckily, all of my grades were quite good, which was a nice feeling and meant leaving on a happy note, academics-wise.

Certificate of completion

I’ve been to the circus. I know the circus is always a subject of controversy when animals are involved, but I thought I would check it out anyway. Sometimes, even when you’ve heard other people’s negative views on things, you need to see them for yourself in order to form your own opinions. This was one of those times.

I’ve faced packing dilemmas that I never thought would cross my mind. I found myself doing things like staring at my full bottles of shampoo and conditioner thinking, ‘well, I can’t pack you, you’re far too heavy. So... do I wash my hair more often this week, or just use more shampoo and conditioner when I do shower?’.  Why was I ever having this conversation with myself?!

I had the absolute most amazing leaving drinks send-off, along with Stefka, who was leaving the following weekend, and Jordan and James, who flew back last night. It was probably the best night out I’ve had in Tver.

Manchester Students Unite! 

My friend, Hannah, from Yaroslavl’ came to stay with me for a little while!

On Tuesday 26^th November, the time came to leave Tver, because we’d decided to spend our last few days here, in Moscow. Hannah and I set off for the station at 4.45pm to catch the 5.45pm train.  We thought we’d give ourselves an hour so that we could get some food before we got on the train and basically just play is safe;  the train times have been known to change unexpectedly. The night before we left Tver, it started snowing. There were a good few inches of snowfall overnight, which made for a pretty difficult journey to the station. We boarded a tram to the station, thinking it’d all be plain sailing from then on. We were wrong. About 5 minutes into our journey, we heard a bit of a thud and our tram came to halt. The woman driving the tram got out of her little pod and ordered us all off the tram. We all looked at each other like, what?! It had taken us long enough to get all of the bags onto the tram. As we got off, it became very apparent that a car had crashed into the front of the tram.

Please take note of car attached to front of tram in the background

Russia may be a lot of things, but it is never boring. We then had no choice but to continue on foot. I can’t thank you enough Jordan, James, Kristina, Frances and Saidi!! Your bag carrying/pulling/dragging skills were amazing and we genuinely would have missed our train without your help! 

Now that we’re in Moscow, we’ve been filling our days as best we can. 

GUM shopping centre looking all Christmassy!

We’ve been to red square every day and we’ve finally been to see Lenin! Which was underwhelming to be honest. You basically enter a fairly modestly sized room and you walk up some stairs onto a raised platform, where you walk around Lenin and then down the stairs again. You have to be constantly moving, no stopping for a look, so in the 8 seconds that I had to walk past him, I didn’t really get to see him for very long at all. We also went to a vodka museum, which was pretty interesting. However, they did promise us a free shot of vodka during our tour and that wasn’t offered to us at any point.

They had a massive collection of vodka brands and bottles (as one would expect from a vodka museum, I’m sure). My friend pointed out a beautiful pink bottle of vodka on one of the shelves. It was called ‘GIRL’, and the slogan underneath read, ‘FOR GIRLS ONLY’.  Well ladies, I don’t know about you, but personally I do not drink vodka unless it comes in a pink bottle. Sometimes I won’t even settle for that, unless it comes with a rainbow and a pocket sized unicorn and a pack of lady tissues for my lady emotions. (I know this kind of advertising isn’t limited to Russia.)

We also got to have our last Moscow meet up with Kristina and Frances, which of course came with its own tearful goodbye. <3

Over the past three months, I decided make a note of the things that I’ll miss/things that I won’t miss after I leave Tver. Enjoy!!

 THINGS I WON’T MISS

1. The silverfish in the bathroom. Countless times I would see them scurrying about on the bathroom floor. Even now in Moscow, I’ve just been chased around the shower room by one that was trying to climb onto my foot.
2. No matter how much we cleaned, our flat was always dirty -especially the skirting boards!
3. The acts of racism, homophobia and hypocritical attitude towards it.
4. Sexism-Even in our textbooks and reading exercises there would be blatant sexist comments and phrases thrown in there for good measure. Here’s an example of one of the sentences we were reading in a text about future careers, ‘I like science and maths, but I cannot become an engineer, because that is a man’s job’.
5. Shots come in 50ml here. I think I’m right in saying that 50ml is double the size of the shots we get in the UK? That is TOO MUCH for one shot! It takes me about three attempts to finish it. Three long, painful attempts.
6. Having to walk to the pump whenever we needed water - Not being able to drink the tap water was a pain at first, but we got used to it after a while. The only problem came when we didn’t realise we’d used up all the water in the evening and then the following day we’d have no water for chai! Nightmare!
7. Showering and then realising that the water you’ve been showering in is brown. This happened a few times. Also, there would sometimes be metal fragments in it. Not ideal.
8. Not being able to have a bath. We didn’t have a shower curtain and the shower head wasn’t fixed to the wall, so we had to sit down in the bath tub, holding the shower head in order to shower without soaking the whole bathroom... that is the closest thing we got to a bath and I’m a girl who likes her baths!
9. Waiting 30mins for the kettle to boil every time you need a cup of tea. This took some getting used to and was the biggest pain when we only had 30mins between classes, so we couldn’t even nip down for chai. Exceptions were made towards the end of the semester though, when we just brought our freshly made chai up to the second class with us.
10. The glacial speed of the internet. It came and it went. Don’t get me wrong, I was really grateful that we had wifi in our accommodation, but I have to admit, I’ll be happy when I have my high speed broadband back!
11. The babushkas in my accommodation- terrifying. All of them, terrifying. I thought one of them wasn’t too bad (the young one), but she screamed at me last week because our hallway was making too much noise, and I happened to walk past her at the wrong time and feel the full force of her wrath.
12. The babushkas in the shops- customer service is not a thing here. At all. If you were in a position where you serve the public, then that’s exactly what your job is. To serve. It is not within your job role to make small talk, be polite or smile at the customer. You simply need to serve them as quickly as possible. It’s not seen as rude in Russia, it’s simply all that is required of them in their job role.  As a foreigner though, having worked in customer service and having been taught certain phrases to say to customers when serving them/to at least make conversation or even just SMILE, I find it a bit blunt to have zero customer interaction when at the till point.
13. Disorganisation! Things do not run like clockwork here. Lots of ремонт (repairs) about and shops скоро открытие (opening soon) with no date or indication as to when they’ll be finished or open. This was particularly sad because there was a Cinnabon shop taunting me in Tver, because it was ‘скоро открытие’. It was ‘скоро открытие’ for the whole three months that I was there. It still remains unopened.
14. Not being able to buy spirits in a supermarket after 9pm -especially if you fancied a spontaneous night in/out that involved alcohol.
15. Awkward grammar lessons. The worst lesson of the week was grammar. Sorry, but it was. It was just a class spent completing exercises from a textbook and not being taught anything new. We’d not even reached verbs of motions by the time we’d left, because we’d been so busy recapping all of the basic grammar, like cases. Very annoying. The grammar lessons at Manchester are so brilliantly taught that they had well and truly set the bar. A bar which was not even almost met in Tver.

THINGS I’LL MISS

1. Everything being within walking distance- My flat was on the first floor of my building and lectures took place on the second floor. Sometimes I would leave my flat with seconds to spare before the start of my classes and still be the first person there. There was also a 24 hour supermarket less than 5 minutes away!
2. Free cloak rooms- In all clubs/bars/restaurants there are free cloakrooms. This means that you can layer up for your walk to the venue and then strip off once you get there. On some wintery nights, it was definitely needed! This also gave us the chance to carry both heels and flats with us, which meant no heel-in-hand-bare-footed-walks home.
3. How cheap everything is! The beer, supermarkets, restaurants etc. On one of my last days in Tver, I went to a cafe and ordered, a ‘soft scramble’ (a fried egg on toast with cheese and bacon..ish), a freshly baked croissant with jam and two glasses of champagne. That meal totalled 190 roubles, which is about £3.80. I’m yet to find somewhere that offers something similar in England.
4. Bread- The bakery in the Perekrestok supermarket sells the tastiest, freshly baked breads. I was eating so much bread that for a short period of time, I had to limit myself to one day a week when I was allowed bread. Bread Sunday. My will-power only lasted for two weeks though before I needed my daily bread fix again.
5. Lectures starting at 10am. Man do I love a lie in!
6. Having a three day weekend... every week! No explanation required as to why I’ll miss this!!
7. People thinking we’re interesting because we’re English. I met several people who had been studying English for years, but had never spoken to a native English speaker before, so they were quite keen to chat to us. Understandably, this happened less often in Moscow though. Rather the opposite in fact. Even when trying to speak Russian, they would often reply to you in English. It would appear that not everyone loves a trier!
8. Being able to speak English and have the people around you not understand. This was amazing. There are very few places nowadays where people don’t understand English, so this was such a novelty. It felt like we all had a secret language.
9. Crazy dancing – We did this frequently. We stood out as foreign anyway, so thought we’d embrace it. We even made up dance routines during drunken evenings in and we would do them during drunken evenings out.
10. Champagne and vodka. As you can imagine, incredibly cheap. Bottles of ‘champagne’ for £3 or less and the same for vodka. With vodka, however, I learnt that you should spend at least £5 on a bottle of vodka if you don’t want to be horrifically ill the next day. If anyone recalls my Vodka We Need To Talk post, then you will know why.
11. Sleepovers – I’ve not had a sleepover since I was about 11, so having the opportunity to slide our mattresses across into neighbouring flats for sleepovers was so much fun. More fun than as a child though, because these sleepovers involved wine.
12. Movie nights – Everyone loves a movie night.
13. Awkward grammar lessons - Some of these lessons were so awful, that you had to laugh. There were so many awkward silences and just generally awkward situations floating about. I added this to the ‘miss’ list quite early on though, thinking that the lessons would get better... they didn’t and instead they generally just got more frustrating, so that’s why it’s also been added it to the list of things that I will not miss.
14. THE PEOPLE. Meeting so many people from so many different cultures was so interesting! I didn’t know that there would be Finnish, German, French, Columbian (etc) students studying in Tver too, because I thought it would just be RLUS students! It was so exciting to get to meet everyone.
15. The funny graffiti  - I’ve taken a lot of pictures of the graffiti I found. Mostly the random English words which were dotted about! I’ll upload them all in a post soon.
16. It being acceptable to drink vodka on its own and also to be able to just order a glass of vodka in bar without the barman/woman looking at you like you’re Drinky McDrinkerson.
17. Being able to use the word ‘кошмар’ (‘koshmar’ = nightmare) to express my distain for a situation. You can put so much emotion into it that saying ‘nightmare’ in English simply won’t do.

I’ll be touching down in London town (sorry couldn’t help it) at 5.45pm this evening!! EEK! And then I will fly to Manchester and touchdown at about 9pm, hopefully. While in England, I’ll write up my posts about Kiev and Chernobyl and anything else that I feel is mention worthy.

So to sum up, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME, TVER! It’s definitely been an experience that I won’t ever forget!! Now, please, for the love of god... someone hand me a roast!!

XxX

Apologies!

I know it's been ages since my last post. I have so many things to write about, but finding the time to do so is really difficult!! I'm currently in Moscow, lying on my hostel bunk bed, deciding how to spend my last full day in Russia! I can't believe I'm flying home on Saturday night. I actually can't wait!!
For the past few weeks I've been trying to spend my time doing as many things as possible, which has meant that I've had very little time to blog!! But I will. When I say I have a lot to write about, I really mean it!!

Bear with me!
XxX

Halloween, The Great Escape, Stray Dogs and Ukraine

In about 5 hours time I will be in a taxi on the way to the train station to start my very long journey to Kiev, Ukraine. I thought that since I’d be without internet for the rest of the week, I’d write a little update now. If anything, it gives me something to do with all of my excited/nervous energy!!

First on the agenda is a little bit on what I promised I’d write about in my last post (Expect; free meals, girly sleepovers, early Halloween, bar friends):

Free meals - We are really lucky in the fact that not only does one of our lecturers from Manchester University come to visit us to check how we’re all getting on, but UoM also pay for us all to go out for a meal. I researched the best restaurants and Joe went and booked us a table at Fortuna, which is an excellent restaurant about a 5 minute walk away from our accommodation. I couldn't wait to make the most of getting a feast, especially since I'd had eggs and spinach for dinner for two nights on the run before.The food in Fortuna was excellent, topped only by the company. It was the first thing we’d done just as Manchester students and it was lovely to have a catch up with everyone.

My starter was Жюльен на тарелке which translates to
Julien on a plate. It's not as impressive a name in English.
It was chicken and mushrooms with mozzarella in a
white wine sauce, wrapped in puff pastry.

Main - Beef Stroganoff 

Dessert - Mille Feuille (ish)

Girly Sleepovers - Stefka and I were lucky enough to get invited to Kristina and Frances’ flat for the sleepover of the year. It was a genuine girly sleepover, but this time with alcohol. We dragged our mattresses into their flat, because even though we live about two metres away from them, it’s not a real sleepover unless we actually sleep over. We watched films, drank champagne, ate caviar like true Russians (vom) and danced to our treasured 90s pop. We also made up a dance routine, which we now proudly whip out in clubs. The locals think we’re amazing dancers. They don’t say it, but we can see it in their eyes...

Sleepover snacks

Kristina made us 'Special Breakfast'.
They are the only ones here with a
toaster, this was such luxury.

‘Early Halloween’ - One of the occasions where we whipped out the dance routine was at Horoshii Povod. On this occasion we were going for our friend Robin’s birthday. We didn’t realise that Horoshii Povod was celebrating Halloween a week early though so we were a little underdressed. However, good old Tver had us covered by the way of a face painting station. Drunk and like a fool I got my face painted (I also slept in it and scared Stefka when she woke up harhar). It was a brilliant night. I even asked the DJ if I could dance on the big speaker...which is funny, because I am an awful dancer. I have no idea why Russia was celebrating Halloween early, but I was happy about it. Especially since real Halloween was a bit of a letdown (see below). 

Facepaint with the Finns

Speaker dancing with Rachael

Bar friends- I woke up after ‘Early Halloween’ to find that a lady called Ekaterina had given me her number and written St Petersburg on it. I was wracking my brain to figure out who she was and what I’d arranged to do in St Petersburg(?!). Then I remembered that I was sat next to a couple of Russian women who I decided to become friends with. They didn’t speak English so I delivered my best drunk Russian and eventually, after befriending these ladies, I agreed to teach Ekaterina English once I move to St Petersburg and she’ll show me around the city. I have no idea if this will happen, but watch this space.

My friend managed to snap this picture without me noticing.
That's me in deep conversation with my new Russian friends.
Ekaterina is out of the shot, but that's her neighbour, Olga.

Second on the agenda is Halloween:

Soo Halloween fell on a Thursday this year which was excellent for us, because we always have Friday’s off, so Thursday is always our going out night. A lot of people had planned their costumes in advance, but I was rubbish and thought I’d just decide on the day. I thought that if all else failed, I could wear all black and do some crazy make up of some sort. We found this amazing shop, which is a bit like a Russian version of TK Max.. but with a lot more fur, lace, spandex etc! I should take some sneaky pictures of Russian fashion to upload onto here at some point, because, man, it is something!

I originally picked up black leggings and a baggy black top, but then I passed this red dress which was only £2 and it claimed to be Vera Wang, so I couldn’t resist it. I decided that I’d be a ‘zombie bride’ type creature, compete with a bouquet of dead roses (thanks Russian uni halls for having dead flowers in vases everywhere, it’s not creepy at all). We came home and started on the makeup and the champagne. I then decided to customise my ‘dress’ which wasn’t the best idea when tipsy. On reflection there was definitely a bit too much boob on view!

The night was a bit of a shambles really for the following reasons:

1.     We somehow got locked on the university campus and had to break out.

I threw my bags on the ground and decided to
roll under the gate. 

This is me, enjoying freedom.

The Great Escape: Tver 

2.   Russia doesn’t really celebrate Halloween, so wandering around all dressed up did make us stand out as foreigners and it also stopped us getting into a few places. (Mainly the boys though, because some of them decided to go as stereotypical 'Gypsies', so they were wearing sweatpants.)

Stefka, Kristina, Frances (deceased pin-up girls) & Me

3.     We ended up in Chicken House once again.

I got in trouble for taking this photograph.
"Photography is forbidden in Chicken House!"

The thing I love about the clubs/bars here is that they all have free cloakrooms. This means that if we are wearing going out clothes then a ‘beer jacket’ isn’t required, we can take actual jackets!!  Being cheeky Brits, we take advantage of this. Over my little dress I had tracksuit bottoms, ugg boots, a ski jacket and a rucksack to put them all in once I got to the club. This did mean stripping off around the corner from each club though, which was a bit awkward. I got caught putting my tracksuit bottoms back on after our group got rejected from Zerkalo (low point) and a beautiful French man thought that I was going for a wee on the street. So he stopped everyone from walking past me, telling them all that I needed privacy!! I was like, I’m not that bad!! Hahaha!!

Since then we’ve been enjoying the start of reading week. I’ve been out to lunch with some great friends and explored around the Volga. 

Stefka, the Volga and a stray dog that adopted us. If you're looking for a word to describe the expression on Stefka's face, it's terror.

It was a troubling time. We thought Chenkov (I named him) was going to be with us
forever.

We went for a spontaneous night out to Horoshii Povod on Saturday night, which was amazing at first, but it ended quite badly and didn’t show Russia in a brilliant light. It’s probably best that I wait until I am back in England to write about that though. I’ve decided to play it safe.

Third and finally we have Ukraine:

I am seriously excited to go to Ukraine. Like I said at the start of this post, we leave in about 5 hours and then we’ve got a two hour train journey to Moscow, where we’ll be meeting our friends from Yaroslavl’. We’ve then got a 9 hour train journey to Kiev! I can’t wait! I love sleeper trains. I’ve packed all of my books and snacks (even though I did ‘accidentally’ start eating them before, m’bad).

We’ve booked to go on a day tour of Chernobyl on Friday as part of our trip. This is the thing that I am most excited about, but the more I think about it, the more nervous I’m getting. I’ve spent the last few nights researching it and it has proved quite difficult reading.  I know that it will be incredible to see an abandoned city and I can’t wait to learn more about it, however, I also know that it will probably be a very emotional and thought-provoking tour. I’ve been told that the radiation we’ll be exposed to should be no more than that of an x ray or transatlantic flight and we get checked for radiation multiple times during the tour, so all should be well on that front. (I hope!!)

Wish me luck!! Hopefully I won’t return with an extra limb or glow-in-the-dark skin or anything.

XxX