Posted in Architecture, Britain, Drink, Holidays, Marriage, Russia, TV on December 31, 2006 | 9 Comments »
You used to be awful at New Year’s. You’d like to be sniffy and say it was because you aren’t very good at having fun to order, but actually it was probably more because you had a tendancy to be bad at ordering the fun and would rather wait and see if it would turn up of [...]
Posted in Architecture, Britain, Education, Language, Monarchy, Patriotism, Sightseeing, Teenagers, Work on December 31, 2006 | 8 Comments »
The first time you went to Windsor Castle was with a bunch of foreign teenagers you were shepherding about as part of your job on an EFL summer school.
Your most abiding memory was of reeling out of the ticket office in shock at the amount of money you had just forked over for your group [...]
Posted in Britain, Culture Shock, Drink, Food, Morality, Russia, Travel on December 20, 2006 | 13 Comments »
Once upon a time you asked a Russian if he’d enjoyed his recent business trip to Great Britain.
“Yes,” he said, “London was great. But,” he added, a look of slightly shocked disgust sliding over his face, “the British really drink far too much.”
This isn’t an isolated opinion either but pretty much the the first comment on the [...]
Posted in Morality, Public Transport on December 11, 2006 | 9 Comments »
So there you are last week sometime standing at the bus stop in the early morning gloom, leaning on a lamp post and waiting for your ride to come by.
Suddenly, there it is, lumbering slowly and reddly down the road towards you. You stand up a bit straighter, brace yourself for action and prepare to put out a [...]
Posted in Education, Work on December 8, 2006 | 12 Comments »
Arrive with a cold.
Cough and sneeze conspicuously and thoroughly, covering the place where you and 20 others are going to be closely confined for the next month with a miasma of germ ridden spittle and snot.
Insist on having the heating turned way up so that you all spend three hours a day locked into in a positive petrie dish of fermenting [...]
Posted in Blogging, Britain, Culture Shock, Drink, Food, Holidays, Russia, TV on December 4, 2006 | 3 Comments »
AB’s Christmas meme:
This quiz makes some assumptions about the way that various mid-winter festivals are celebrated in the modern world. Feel free to change it to suit your circumstances.
Which mid-winter festival(s) did your family celebrate when you were a child?
Christmas and New Year.
Which mid-winter festival(s) do you celebrate as an adult?
British Christmas.
New Year in the Russian style, which is the [...]
Posted in Architecture, Culture Shock, Drink, Food, Music, Russia, Sightseeing on December 1, 2006 | 2 Comments »
The last time you went to the actual Bolshoi happened to be for an opera:
You don’t go to the Bolshoi for the performances. Well, I know you don’t. You opera/ballet appreciation skills are about as well developed as your ability to speak Russian.
But what I mean, with all apologies to the artists involved, is [...]
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