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...