Seems like forever since I used the internet last... still got to work out a better way of doing this. The place where I am at the moment has extremely variable prices - I think it depends on whether they think we're Russian or not. My trick so far has been to say as little as possible in the hope that this will be mistaken for true Russian surliness. It sometimes works.

So let's see, what's happened since last time... ah yes, Stolby. It's soo pretty! For any climbers reading this, it's like Font (but with more broken glass due to the Russian habit of drinking piva - beer - as often as possible. I've seen them on the bus on my way into uni with an open bottle in hand...). For everyone else, it's a huge national park type thing with lots of hills, trees and the stolby themselves (which are huge rocks that are randomly scattered about the place). Surprisingly, I didn't do much climbing! And nothing too technical. I was basically too slow, Ben beat me to it and then the teacher we were with started pleading with us not to do it... and yet she led the way up a different rock later on. Weird.

So anyway, looking out over the Siberian forest from the top of a stolby and seeing all the different coloured trees... autumn literally arrived overnight, so where on Thursday everything was green, on Friday there were so many different shades of yellow etc. Poetic. I don't know what I mean by that.

Saturday we went to a market, which was fun if intimidating... luckily I wasn't looking for anything, but those who were kept getting accosted by the Kazakh stall owners, saying "Please look, girls, try this, try that, why are you going away?!". We managed to escape alive though, although it was a bit close at times! :)

Sunday was the day of work. Sad, I know, but it has to happen sometime! What with grammar and then Gulya on Monday, it's a bit of a tough way to start the week (although most of our grammar lessons so far have been on phonetics - ie how to pronounce these sounds that don't exist in English. I thought I could do them pretty well, but apparently not...). In the evening though we went to see a rugby match - that was so much fun! It cost us a whole 50r to get in (about a pound), and then Ben got stopped by the militsia, which was scary... turns out they just wanted to check whether he had any alcohol in his bag. He didn't, to which the militsia man replied "What, don't you drink in England?!" Ah, if only he knew...

(I wrote out a really detailed description of the rugby match and other things, and then lost it when it wouldn't post despite the fact that I'd saved it as a draft... now I'm too disheartened to write it out again, so maybe next time! Stupid IE!)