Photo Update

Everything is going well now and things are really starting to come together. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have some friends at our University as well. No interesting news as of yet, just going to Uni and studying.

So I thought I would upload some more photos of our Uni and surrounding area.

 The view from the 7th floor of of Uni

An outdoor gym, for those who really are fearless.

Update

Sorry I haven't done an update recently, have been very busy which can only be a good thing. Recently things have become much better. Max, a fellow russianist from Durham, arrived on friday and we have made friends which some Russians: Ramil and Sasha who have been very helpful giving us a nice tour of the city and making sure that everything is going smoothly.

Things are starting to look up, though the weather is still pretty harsh. Walking around is still an intersting experience with the inside of one's nostrils constantly freezing over (ie it is lower than -15).

Anyway I will do a proper post soon in the next couple of days hopefully.

Chocolate Cheese

Heston Blumenthal, eat your heart out! The Russians have come up with something that you could have never even imagined. While you have your decadent bacon and egg ice cream, we have our chocolate cheese:

(Literally translated: Smooth Chocolate Cheese)

Opening this gem of a find, I found the cheese to look and smell very similar to any other chocolate spread with a little twist at the end. I was cautiously optimistic that this new spread could change my culinary life. 

I chose to eat the spread with bread as I thought it was the best medium which one can eat both cheese and chocolate spread with.

I was surprised by how tasty it looked; its texture was very similar to honey. Unfortunately the taste itself was far from desirable.

At first the smoothness of the chocolate is evident but then a strange taste, akin to sour milk, comes across which really ruins the experience. Least I only paid 20p for this culinary adventure while customers of the Fat Duck would pay £131 plus wine.

Pimp My Ride: St Petersburg

While I was in St P, I noticed a lot of highly dubious paint work that even Tim Westwood would have been disappointed with. Here were a couple of gems:

One for the ladies' man:

And then of course Sex Panther:

Uni Art

Here is some nice soviet art which is painted around the Uni

Town

So as I have already mentioned I live in the suburbs of Ulyanovsk, so since today was a nice sunny day I decided to make a little trip to the town centre. Even though the pictures don't really show it, the centre of town is surprisingly busy and a nice hub of activity and capitalism

There are a couple of shopping malls dotted around, the quality of which however is a bit dubious. The only Western brand names I saw were Adidas and Reebok...woohoo.

The roads are nicely bumpy and soon I will do a post about the small minibuses which whizz around (you can see the back of one in the picture above). They are definitely the most surreal thing so far on my Year Abroad.

The one thing I am not looking forward to is Spring when the icicles fall of the roofs. You can see some here, though these are absolutely minuscule in comparison to the one which were in St P

The egg of Mantumbi

I decided to go for walk today and get some fresh air. Unfortunately it was snowing and the wind made the walk pretty unbearable.

Nevertheless I continued on my adventure

I walked for about 25 minutes to the bank of the Volga, one of Russia's biggest rivers. Unfortunately the view wasn't great due to the snow and wind, but the view was very impressive.

Pictures of my walk back to the flat

Ulyanovsk

Hey

Sorry about my lack of posting, I haven't been in Russia since the 15th of December and I was getting pretty lazy by the end of St Petersburg. One of my many new year's resolutions is to keep this blog updated, so we will see how that goes.

My new placement is in Ulyanovsk where I will be living for the next four months. It is in the Ural mountains and is the birth place of Lenin. It is 900km East of Moscow...so I am experiencing life in the provinces.

I am studying in Ulyanovsk Technological State Uni which is a campus based university situated 20 minutes from the town centre. I am staying in student halls which as you can see from the picture above is nicely Soviet 

The layout of the surrounding buildings is very Russian. The picture above shows the neighbouring student halls with a playground/football pitch/snow pit in the middle.

Here is another picture of my accommodation, I am living in the building with the 80ft poster on it (it says 'The territory of sport'...ha)

Luckily the Uni itself is only a 3 minute walk which is pretty useful when it is -20c outside.

It's hard to show actually how much snow there is here but the two banks in the picture above are taller than me. Apparently it has been snowing constantly for the last 5 days now. 

The walk is beautiful though and you can really appreciate the beauty, even if by now your cheeks are numb.

So here is my Uni in its full glory. It stands on the bank of the Volga, so I will try and get some pictures of that when I can be bothered to go through waist high snow. For now these pictures should suffice.