I notice this site hasn't caught on to the new time system in Russia - Putin decided not to change the clocks this year, so they wouldn't lose valuable trading hours with the Far East. But it's messing eveyrthing up for everyone because now we've lost hours with the West and that's causing bigger problems - so it's expected to go back to normal next year. For now I have to pretend I'm in Abu Dhabi to get the time zone right.

It's midday on Friday, and normally at this point I would be asleep. Not a lie-in but rather going back to bed - on Friday mornings I have a class at 7.30 an hour's journey from my flat, meaning I have to get up at 5.30, and I tend to go back to bed for a bit after that class. But not today. I'm being "productive" today instead.

As usual I have a list of disjointed things I wanted to include, and they are going to be all discombobulated (FINALLY I get to use that word ... sorry if I'm using it wrong - I'd never seen it before in my life then came across it 3 times in one day in different contexts) so bear with me.

My friend Dave (from Tripoli - remember him?) took me along to a choir rehearsal about 6 weeks ago, and unfortunately I had to decide I don't have time to join a choir, especially not one which rehearses late weekday evenings and charges a 2500rouble (about £50) membership fee, but they rehearse in the Anglican Church (St Andrews - off Tverskaya for those who know Moscow) and then I knew where it was. So the following Sunday Anastasia and I went along to their English-speaking service. Well, it was pretty Anglican, really. Lots of families, mostly Brits and Americans but plenty of others too. The weeks that Anastasia's able to come (which isn't every week as she is working towards some pretty serious financial exams and has to study hard at weekends) we go for coffee and pancakes together afterwards and speak Russian only. Russian cafes and restaurants cover their tables with so much paraphernalia (it's a good day for using words I've never used before) that you don't have space to put your hands down, let alone manage to *not* feel crowded when your coffee and pancakes arrive. Last Sunday, Anastasia couldn't make it, and it was the first week that both I'd gone by myself and also didn't have to rush off somewhere afterwards, so for the first time I was able to stay afterwards and have coffee and meet some people there (for some reason Anastasia doesn't like the idea of having coffee at Church and meeting people - I'm trying to work it out) and I had a nice chat with two British women, both older than me, both also English teachers. Complete chance that they were the ones I ended up talking to, but bizarrely they also both have strong connections with the Middle East. It's a funny old world.

About a month ago (gosh is it really that long?) my good friend Steph came over from England to visit her Dad for a couple of days. On the Monday I had a few hours free - a rare event - and Steph and I had lunch (nothing extravagant - just stuff cooked in Steph's dad's kitchen - we're still working on becoming ladies who lunch) and then walked up to Red Square and around GUM for a bit, admired all the expensive shops that we'll never shop in, ridiculed the fashion, narrowly avoided being arrested but I can't remember what for - something trifling - and got very cold. Oh and successfully avoided the hoards of American Jehovah's Witnesses who live in the same building as her father. We had a fun time.

The weather's getting colder. For a long time it hovered around zero, never getting much below, but we have had a few days of minus 10. Although today is back to zero. It's all snowy today, but it's not thick and I'm not expecting it to last long - it fell overnight and it's quite warm today. However I have now started wearing 2 scarves and a hat every day. On windy days I need two pairs of tights. The wind here BITES!

About 3 weeks ago Lynsey and I went to a place called Izmailovsky, in the north east of Moscow. There's a good market there - popular with tourists but also where the Russians go when buying Russian presents for friends and relatives abroad. Good quality and good prices. And friendly, chatty stall holders. It's still the wrong side of Christmas so I daren't reveal the specifics of my purchases, but I got some pretty cool things. Including a beautiful fur hat for an absolute steal of a price. It was colder there than the rest of the city - we suspect because it's a less built-up area (it's pretty much in a big park) so we took shelter in a cafe in a fantastic wooden building that felt to me pretty Siberian in style (any Krasnoyarskis reading this - the one decent meal we had in Listvyanka? Building similar to that but cooler) where we had tasty soups and salads and meatballs and tea for a very small sum and didn't get food poisoning. Then we took the metro one stop further to the park itself and walked around there for a bit. 'Twas a nice park, nothing special, just open space and grass and trees and a little stream and a small lake and stuff. Evidently a massive area - we just saw a small part of it. We ended up walking through what appeared to be a men's outdoor fitness club - and all of their equipment was really baladi. How do we say that in English? I've never found a suitable equivalent outside of Arabic. Countryside-y. Shoddy. In a sort of quaint but slightly crap way. They had rusty metal poles with big logs stuck on the end as weights, and that kind of thing. It was really pretty funny, just a bunch of assorted men in tracksuits in a forest lifting home-made weights together with a man shouting at them, and then we stumbled through by accident and they all stopped and stared.

I'm not sure if I'm more scared of the packs of stray dogs who wander the city, or the packs of stray policeman who wander the streets and the metro. I feel quite sorry for them really. They shuffle up and down the metro platforms in groups of 6 or 8, in a crocodile, looking like death. They evidently work horrible shifts, they look so tired and miserable. More than most Russians. And it's boiling in the metro but they have to wear their heavy coats and hats all the time. But you don't want to risk crossing Russian men in that kind of a state. I don't know how the dogs survive here, though. Evidently people must feed them and some of them must find warm places to go when it's really cold, but you'd think, given the climate, there'd be fewer of them. There was, however, a dead dog outside my building one day last week.

Three weeks ago ish my friend Dave (not Tripoli Dave) arrived to work for a different school, in a suburb of Moscow. In the end he's changed his plans and gone back home (such is the nature of this strange place) but a few days after he arrived I went out to the end of the metro (off the edge of the map!) to meet him off the bus from his suburb and show him how to navigate the metro - tricky for those who aren't used to metro systems and those who don't speak Russian - Dave falls into both those categories - and we met Hannah in the centre and had a rather expensive but very good shisha. It was so good Hannah and I decided to go every week, but then we saw how much it was costing us and decided to make it a monthly treat. To share.

Two weeks ago I met my friend Anna Svidler, whose family I stayed with in Perm the first time I went there, on the 6th form Russian exchange. She's been in Moscow for the last 6 months, working in Accenture. She was delighted when I'd heard of it - she says most Russians haven't. I last saw Anna 5 years ago when I went back to Perm for 2 months during my gap year. I stayed with a different family, whose daughter was also called Anna, and I introduced the two, they became friends, and are still good friends now. They even lived together for a few months when they first came to Moscow. Pretty good friendship matchmaking on my part. I haven't yet had a chance to meet other Anna, but Anna (this is confusing) tells me she's working for one of the big greeting card companies writing the printed messages and poems in their cards. You think all these Annas are confusing? Anna II's brother is called Dima, went out with Anna I for a bit, still part of the same group of friends, and when I was there Anna II was going out with another guy called Dima who is also still part of the same group of friends. So we have 2 Dimas too. Oh and Anna II and Dima I's parents are called Valya and Valera, and I never quite got my head around which was which.

The subject of relationships between men and women in Russia is one which has come up before and inspired many a rant on my part, so I shan't go into it again, save to report something new I discovered from one of my students. Some of the "classier" restaurants here apparently have 2 menus - one for the men and one for the women. The women's one doesn't have the prices on it.

I shall leave you with a few anecdotes from class. I'll start with the most disturbing. In one of the advanced textbooks I work from, there's an exercise with photographs of 4 people, and their names and jobs are written underneath. There was Julia, an art teacher, Janet, a pensioner, Colin, a sailor, and Max, a soldier. Julia was mixed-race. The students were told that the 4 people had been asked the question, "if you were a food, what would you be and why?" The were given in the wrong order and they had to match them up. They were: "baked beans, because they're full of protein and good for you;" "a bar of chocolate, because it's smooth and velvety, like me;" "a cauliflower, because it's beautiful and intricate;" and "nuts, because they're hard on the outside but worth opening for what's on the inside." Now to me they were all pretty obvious: baked beans - sailor; nuts - soldier; cauliflower - art teacher; chocolate - pensioner. But not to my dear students. Every single one of them, and I taught this lesson to 4 different groups over a fortnight, couldn't see any possible reason for the cauliflower and the chocolate to be that way around - in their minds, the black person just HAD to be the chocolate bar, there's no other logical choice, is there?

I met a nice Russian girl at the language club, who was very good at English but got her words a little confused and asked me, "how many stupids do you have?"

I was trying to explain the difference between verbs which can be used in both the present simple and the present continuous but have different meanings in the 2 tenses (i.e. "I think you're nice" vs "I'm thinking of getting a haircut") and verbs which you can only use in one tense (i.e. you couldn't say "I'm liking chocolate") and picked a bad example to demonstrate. I tried to compre "I have a dog" with "I'm having a dog". But of course the student had heard the phrase "I'm having a baby". Should have said kittens instead of dog...

A moment of exasperation came with a student who arrived to a lesson 20 minutes late, and then asked "will we need something to write with today?" When I said yes, the student had to go back to their desk to get a pen.

I think my favourite so far, though, was from the advanced student - so she definitely knew what she was saying - who announced that she "didn't like Shrek, because, as so often happens in real life, the ugly people won. I mean, they had good souls, but they were ugly."