Rossiya, where the temperature drops 15 degrees in one week All the vegetables here are giant. Lucy's hosts have given her a giant sack of giant potatoes, an absolutely enormous cabbage (bigger than a beach ball, no kidding, and seriously heavy) and an oversized relative of the marrow, which we have never encountered before. Mr. Marrow is due to be cooked soon, Вячеслав the cabbage (we named him Vyacheslav for no particular reason) has already contribute...

Mother Russia, where all the best things are shiny... If it's not shiny, it's probably not really worth having. The same goes for leopard print. We're all beginning to find shiny leopard print strangely appealing, and it's only a matter of time before one of us tries on the leopard print leotard with diamante bits we have seen in a shop window. My hostess is truly wonderful. She's probably in her late 40s, and joy of all joys, she has a leopard print fake fur c...

I am here! I have to be quite quick as I am in a rather expensive internet cafe, so this may be all in a jumble and rather difficult to read. As yet I don't have a Russian phone, it seems you need to fill in all sorts of forms to get one, and I don't fancy doing that just yet. My hostess is lovely. She's probably in her fifties, has a grown up son who is married, and she has had 3 husbands. She is utterly obsessed with healthy eating, I am encouraged to eat coo...

So, four days till I go. Just to demonstrate my utter lack of readiness ... I need to start packing, work out which shoes to take (I have already had to rule out all heels, which is really upsetting) and hope to encounter some forgotten money somewhere. There is very little else to report as yet. Conversation with the group (there are 7 of us going in total) currently revolves mostly around the purchase of extra items of thermal underwear, and whether or not it i...