Posted in Britain, Monarchy, Russia, Teenagers, War on June 29, 2006 | 3 Comments »
The other form of rebellion you employed as a teen was to be longwindedly anti-monarchy.
Not violently. Good grief, no. But it probably wasn’t a good idea to get stuck in your vicinity at, say, a party just after mentioning the M word. Not unless you didn’t mind being pushed into a corner and declaimed at [...]
Posted in Footwear, Teenagers on June 27, 2006 | No Comments »
As a teenager, you really only had two forms of rebellion.
One of them was the agressive stomping around in DM boots. Yes, this is, of course, a very middle class and dull kind of rebellion. The problem with being the daughter of Liberal parents is that it’s very difficult to find things which do, in [...]
Posted in Art, Monarchy, Religion, Russia, Sightseeing, War on June 27, 2006 | No Comments »
You’ve just said goodbye to the cousin from St Petersburg. Her visit meant you got in some Proper Sightseeing, and reminded you of the time you stayed with her in her home town. Here’s what you wrote:
2003 marks the year when Peter I stood in the middle of a mosquito-infested swamp he had just wrested [...]
Posted in Britain, Parks, Russia on June 24, 2006 | No Comments »
There's a place in Kolomenskoe park where you can sit on a high ridge and gaze down on a winding stretch of the Moscow River. In winter - which will involve you trekking up a steep slope through knee high snow - you can watch people going sledging and skiing down the hill and in [...]
Posted in Britain, Culture Shock, Education, Russia, Work on June 23, 2006 | 8 Comments »
The other aspect of culture shock is the heady feeling of being righteously enraged by almost everything around you. It’s like channeling Victor Meldrew or one of those American Shock Jock shouty types.
This rarely happened in Russia. You suspect you were in some kind of denial as, conversely, you seemed to be unable to critisise [...]
Posted in Art, Culture Shock, Footwear, Public Transport, Russia on June 22, 2006 | 5 Comments »
A young colleague once told you that the people of L___ - the next small town over from the small town in which you both lived and worked - are ‘not the same as us’.
This, of course, tells you everything you ever need to know about how wars, pogroms or ethnic cleansing get started. However, while conceding that if [...]
Posted in Flags, Football, Patriotism, Russia on June 14, 2006 | 2 Comments »
Yesterday you saw seventy six England flags on your way home. Well, actually you saw more than that, but for the purposes of this survey you are counting one car emblazoned with the red and white as one sighting, although it's tempting to give the person who seems to have redecorated the outside of his whole house (with added flagpoles) with [...]
Posted in Football, Formula One on June 3, 2006 | No Comments »
Well, who’d have thought that your very first ramble here would be on the subject of football? But it is that time of half decade again and let’s face it, it’s inescapable.
Not, surprisingly, that you want to escape it.
Partly this is, of course, that it gives you something to chat about at the water cooler [...]
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