Strange to think I've been here a week already. My journey was pretty uneventful (met my good friend Rob at Heathrow to say goodbye as he was flying to Saudi Arabia the same day) and I was met at Sheremetevo Airport by Denis, one of the staff at Inlingua School. We took the airport express train to the centre, at which point he informed me that instead of going to my flat, I'd be spending the first 5 nights at a hostel near the office, because the previous tenant was still occupying my room in the flat. Well I had to negotiating power so had to fall into line. The hostel was actually very nice and clean, and the people who ran it (and the few other guests I met) were friendly and chatty, but I had no space of my own so couldn't unpack at all, and was sharing a mixed-gender room with people who were definitely not on a work timetable. I was typically getting up only about 2 or 3 hours after they'd gone to bed (and woken me up in the process, had I been fortunate enough to actually get to sleep yet - but I probably woke them when I got up so it's all fair in the end).

Work-wise I was really thrown in at the deep end - my first morning I had a meeting with the director of studies to talk things over and sign my contract, and then the following morning I had an 8am lesson in a fairly remote part of the city, which I had to find with very little help - the map I was given was unhelpful (this has become a running theme) and most Muscovites apparently don't know the street names of the neighbourhoods they live and work in, no not even the big MASSIVE streets like the one I was trying to find. But in the end I got to Bosch ... yes I work in Bosch. I also work in Estee Lauder (their HQ for Russia and the CIS, no less) and Merril Lynch, and a couple of other big corporations I hadn't heard of before.

The students I've met so far (not all the projects are off the ground yet) are very nice and easy to get along with, and pretty good at English, too.

I've been living off a fairly poor diet, I'm afraid, but not for lack of effort. In the hostel I couldn't really cook, so lived off rye bread, sliced cheese, salami, 4-grain porridge and yoghurt drinks. Oh and a couple of bananas. On my third evening I realised I hadn't had a proper meal since lunch on the plane, so i rang David (my soon-to-be housemate) and insisted we went to a cheap restaurant nearby so I could have a meal which involved some vitamins. I had onion soup and salade nicoise, and I was very happy. Since moving to the flat, I've mostly eaten pelmeni. Look them up. They're tasty.

The flat is ... umm ... I'll try to take some pictures and put them up. It's in a reasonable neighbourhood, but the stairwell stinks of dead things and wee, the flat is on the ground floor (so I don't have to put up with the stairwell smell for too long) and clearly when it was last renovated (in about the 60s?) security was not their top priority. No bars on the windows, and there's a busy road right outside. The kitchen is the only communal space, and it's got a 2-foot-square table with 2 stools, and otherwise almost enough space for 2 people to be in there at once. My room is truly miniature, but I just about fit, although the main light doesn't work so I'm relying on the desk lamp. The shower is possibly the worst shower I've experienced in my life. But overall the flat is manageable, the dirt isn't too ingrained so I'm making good headway cleaning it, and anyway we're only here for a month - the school is moving us to a new flat because the landlord wants to sell the flat or something. I've insisted that the next flat is not on the ground floor.

David (my flatmate) is nice - we haven't had much time to talk yet because we have wildly different timetables, but we seem to get along. Other staff at Inlingua seem to be nice, but I haven't met many yet. I've met a girl called Emily, who is working at another language school - Emily knows my friend Steph, who put us in touch, and through her I have also met some other teachers, whom I hope to see more of in future.

All in all, it's been a tough first week, and while it's not all smooth running yet (I sense more low patches looming), it is improving bit by bit. Do please keep in touch!

Later addition: some poorly-typed stories I forgot to add in, which I think you may find entertaining, pasted in from an email to my mum so forgive the scrappy writing - I don't have time to re-type before I lose the internet!

Have caught a cold and spent the afternoon sneezing and blowing my nose (which I think is a really rude thing to do in public in Russia, but what else can you do if you're on the metro and snot is about to dribble over your top lip?). I was 20 minutes late for my lesson - not because of coming from Emily's, where I had lunch, but because the map I'd been given was almost illegible (something that I thought was a massive road was actually a small river...) and didn't mark most of the exits from the relevant metro station, and I came out of an un-marked one, so was off the map. I thought I'd got it worked out, so I walked in the wrong direction for 5 minutes, before realising it wasn't actually the street I thought it was. So I rang the woman whose number I'd been given, and she knew where I was but struggled to explain how to get to where I needed to be. Finally got there - enormous, very modern business park in a tower block, had to show my passport at security on the way in (security guard clearly thought I was trying to break in and really shouldn't have been there) and get given a "guest" tag to get through the turnstiles to the lifts. Managed to make myself look like a complete idiot by not noticing that under the metal bar on the turnstile there was a large plate of glass, which I kicked really hard and it echoed and everyone turned around. Arrived at Estee Lauder's Russia and CIS HQ (yes, really, I work there now) on the 5th floor, and the man who let me in clearly thought I was deluded. But he found one of my 3 students for me (eventually...) - one was on holiday and one had given up waiting and gone home. I'm going to have a slightly awkward conversation with Anastasia tomorrow, trying to explain how it really wasn't my fault that I was 20 minutes late and a student gave up waiting. If the map had been better, I would have been there in plenty of time. And I did ring the contact person there, before the lesson was due to start - if she didn't pass on the the students that I was very nearly there, well, it's not my fault. Apart from the getting lost, I'm going to have to repeat the whole polava (passport, turnstiles, man thinking I'm bonkers) every time I go there, which is twice a week. I made myself look stupid on the way out too, by naively assuming that because my guest card had worked on a random turnstile on the way in, it would work on a random one on the way out too, but no - I had to drop my magnetic card into a special magnetic box on a special style at the end of the row. Surrounding people evidently thought I was mad, but luckily the guard came to my rescue and explained what I had to do. The guard and I are friends now. I hope.