Russland, where they are silly and give you ears for lunch

The temperature is much the same as it was this time last week, but good old Elena insists that my nice English corduroy jacket is no longer warm enough. I said it's ok I have plenty of woolly jumpers and thermals (which I'm not using - not even overnight anymore as the heating has come on and it's boiling). But no, they're no good apparently. So I said it's ok I have my big пуховик (I purchased myself a rather tasteful coat, mid-calf length, stuffed with feathers and down, with a hood and a fur lined collar, it's shiny khaki (a lot better than it sounds, my apologies for compound parentheses) and joy of joys, a leopard print lining). No no she says, it's not cold enough for that yet. As a result, I have been given free-run of her mid-temperature coats. She tells me her collection totals 18, but there are definitely only 7 in the cupboard. There have been some interesting outfits from me this week... we are putting together a portfolio of photos of me in various ridiculous coats.

One might be tempted to think that the Russians have some level of basic intelligence, but do not make the mistake of falling into this trap. If a foreign student in England told you, in their best faltering English, that they couldn't "poke" with a situation, the chances are you would work out pretty quickly, if not straight away, that they meant "cope". No such luck with the Russians. Poor old Lucy was subjected to ridicule amd humiliation when she tried to explain that she had cooked a marrow stuffed with a scarf (sharf) when she meant mince (farsh), and it took them a full 10 minutes with a switch into English and the need for a dictionary to resolve the confusion. I had a similar experience with Elena trying to talk to her about fur coats. I said shubA, with the stress on the A, and it wasn't until I had to find a way around it (saying things like "a coat which is made of fur") that she tumbled to it and said "ahhh SHUba!". Have these people no imagination?

I had a hilarious incident when Sasha (Lucy's enigmatic host) came over to cook his special fish soup for all 6 of us, and to show us how to make it. The Russian for fish soup sounds something like "uha", but I'm still not sure exactly what it is, so I'm sticking to "soup made of fish" to avoid further similar situations. At the end of lunch I tried to thank Sasha, but ended up saying "thank you for your ears, they were delicious". Clearly I must learn the difference between these two very similar words, and how they behave in each of the cases.

Russian creeps are a whole different breed to nice, polite English ones. We are all frequently invited to go home with passers by, get into their cars, etc etc, and we cannot imagine why, as Russian women dress much more provocatively than a bunch of English girls in jeans, flat shoes, no fishnet tights, far less make-up, un-styled hair... It reached new levels the other morning when I was walking between a very busy supermarket one side and a kindergarten the other side, wrapped up in one of Elena's coats to the point of resembling a bright red michelin man with graffiti on him, and a middle aged man crawled his car along beside me for a good couple of minutes, persistently trying to persuade me to get into his car, as I furiously kept walking as fast as I could, scowling Russian-style at the pavement in front of me. He eventually drove off shouting "as you wish...".

We are all trying to find paid work, but it is proving difficult as everything that looks like a possibility turns out to be more Russians who want to stare at us in silence for 5 minutes, demonstating their best "angliisky" grin all the while, then proposing we help out for free at their "language school", at times whwen we have classes anyway.

Vyacheslav the cabbage is still going strong, he has most recently contributed to the scarf-stuffed marrow, and his remains still outsize a normal cabbage.

The hunt for an indoor gym has fallen flat, we have found a couple but all they could offer was expensive aqua-aerobics with the elderly, and there are no running machines or similar to be found. So we are now tracking exercise videos for the newly-fixed DVD player in Lucy's flat. This is more for comedy value than out of a genuine desire to take exercise, especially as the floor is particularly slippery in Lucy's flat, and someone has accidentally landed upon it almost every day... While on our exercise video hunt, we have discovered and purchased Hot Fuzz in Russian. The man in the shop was eager to make conversation, so I explained that Hot Fuzz had been filmd where I live, and he just looked at me as if I had 3 heads, and didn't want to make conversation anymore. I find myself wondering if I said something else by accident.

It seems there is no point inviting Elena to come to England, as she has already told me, in no uncertain terms, that she has no desire to go there. "The weather's bad, the food's bad, the houses are cold. Life is much better in Siberia." She has, however, virtually invited herself to stay with me in Cairo next year. She says she has a friend there, I have my suspicions he is one of the ex husbands.

If anytone fancies writing to me, my address is: Академгородок 12А Корп.3 Кв.6, Красноярск, RUSSIA. And my name in Russian is Роузы Хендерсон. That's actually Lucy's address, her post box is much more secure than mine due to being in the stairwell of her block rather than in a children's playground outside 3 blocks. Try mine if you like, just swap the 12А Корп.3 Кв.6 for 24-13, but there's no guarantee I'll ever get it. Actually there isn't much more of a guarantee with Lucy's either, but I'd still really appreciate some post so please try!

Rules for life in Russia: either conform and do as the Russians do (i.e. wear weird clothes and frown) or deliberately and consciously do what they don't want you to do (i.e. sing at the top of your voice in public, skip along pavements, walk along walls and jump off at the end, jump in puddles, fall over on busses...).