OWC-Travels (Travails and Travail): A Picture Says 1000 Words (but I wrote the 1000 words anyway just because)

I slightly forgot to blog for a bit. It's been the best part of a month and, in that time, I'd say quite a lot has happened. At least, I feel like I've been incredibly busy but as it's with almost exclusively enjoyable things I really won't complain.

I guess the main thing to mention is the visit of the family. As my parents are more or less the only two readers of this blog (hi guys) this is effectively telling them (you) about things that they (you) already know they (you) did. I'm going to stop doing that now.

Anyway, we were proper tourists for a few days. The weather was absolutely perfect every day (as it has been all this week as well - up to 23 degrees and literally haven't seen a cloud). We went to cathedrals and museums and monuments and suchlike, the highlights probably being the Hermitage, Russian Museum, Bronze Horseman, Peter and Paul Fortress, Church of Our Saviour on Blood, Kazan Cathedral, Museum of Political History, Museum of Soviet Arcade Games and the boat trip on the canals. Those weren't really the highlights, that was just pretty much all of it. We did a bit of gastronomic tourism as well (recommend Gogol for some Russian cuisine, Apteka for a decent "Indian restaurant that you enter through a public loo" experience and Terrassa or Mansarda for just a very strong evening). But apart from all that, it was just very excellent to see my parents and sister for the first time in a couple of months, and I always quite enjoy showing people around a bit (if that's what I was doing). What with the hotel being quite good (sauna and swimming pool facilities mainly used by the member of the party who wasn't actually staying there - i.e. me) and journeys both ways going well for them, I hardly think it could've gone better. Hopefully they agree. You. They.

So that was all good. It's been a week since they left and I think things were more or less back to normal, by which I mean 7 teachings, 4 lessons, 5 gyms, some football watching, some FIFA playing, some sleeping, some eating, some working and some relaxing. That's normal. We went out on Friday for Chris' birthday after some pre-sortie pizza and pres with the whole Durham lot here. A good night, dampened only by seeing first hand that some men still think that it's ok to be violent towards their girlfriends.

Что еще? Well, the uni enlisted me, Chris and Georgia to be recorded saying some things in English for the texts that all of the students will be using next year. We were fine with that and have done it twice. The good news is that they've given us huge arrays of foods and Russian pies (which are also foods, yes) both times we've been but the bad news is that we must be really annoying to work with because we end up cracking up laughing whenever anything goes remotely wrong. One of us who shall remain nameless (but isn't me or Chris and is Georgia) at one point read the sentence: "The Spanish RENFE is a system of very high speed trains with several routes across the country and some trains travelling at up to 125 metres per hour." After the original mistake, that took at least 10 takes and me leaving the room before we got through it without laughing.

Before I finish this off, just a quick and slightly more serious thought. At about this time last year, I was debating possibly going to Tomsk or Ulyanovsk rather than Petersburg. This morning I went for a quick walk and saw all this in under an hour: