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.