One thing about getting married is that you really begin to form a greater appreciation of the differences between men and women. No, not in THAT sense: more in the way that they approach life. An article in one of the books that we have about marriage notes that 'Men are like waffles, women are like spaghetti. Men look at life in neat little compartments, dealing with issues one at a time; whereas women think more like a plateful of spaghetti, with lots of it...

Happy New Year! We are now back in Moscow - along with my parents - and last night we all went to Red Square to celebrate the New Year along with seemingly all of Moscow. In true Russian fashion, many didn't start until about 30 minutes before the event started - which only gave them 10 minutes to join the party as the police closed the bridges and access to the area at 11:40pm! Whilst we didn't actually get onto Red Square itself, we stood on Vasilievsky Spus...

After all of the palaver of our arrival, we went shopping in Newcastle yesterday. See above for a picture of the city by night. It's dubbed - correctly - the party capital of the UK and it's certainly a great place to go out if you want to relax with friends. But that's not what we were after! Our mission was very simple: shop. Fortunately most of our shopping had been ordered online so there were literally only a few items to get in town. We still ended up...

After all of the activity in last week's blog, I thought that I might have a quieter week to write about - especially seeing as we were going to the UK.The strike had been called off, we had rebooked and all seemed to be going smoothly.Not so… We woke up on the morning of the 21st to see the snow falling thickly - again, not a cause for concern in Moscow.What might cause Britain to shut down and cut itself off from the outside world simply means that life go...

This year there was an exhibition in Moscow, put on by four expat ladies. It was called 'How do YOU Do Moscow?' It was a collection of opinions and photographs, assembled by these ladies - all 'accompanying spouses', as the lingo would describe them (wives whose husbands' jobs have relocated them here). They spoke to a wide cross-section of the expat community and canvassed their views about this city. It was really interesting to find out the similarities an...