I've finally made it back to the internet cafe! Yay me. Although I think I might be brave soon and branch out to another one, where we don't keep getting different prices for the same thing.

Lessee... rugby match is where I left off last time (not through choice). There was a lot of shouting, as you might expect - many cries of "davai, davai!" which literally means "give" - wasn't sure whether that was telling the players to actually pass the ball, or more in a Canadian "give'er" kind of style. From watching my amazing 6 films on one DVD, I learned that it's the equivalent of the English "go on!". So that's that mystery solved.

There were also cheerleaders, which was a little surreal. They were mostly a distraction from the pitch when the ref and players were having a disagreement - someone would start up the music and they'd run through their routine. Then the argument would still be going on, but the dancers would have run out of dances, so they'd stand there and watch what was happening until another song was put on and they'd start all over again. Amusing.

And of course the important thing was that Krasniy Yar (our team, of course) won! Take that, all you people in Moscow :) . Of course the ref was biased and there were soooo many tackles that even I could tell were illegal (diving on someone at head height, or dragging them down by their shirt)... but we still won. It was exciting.

In other exciting news, we now have train tickets to Irkutsk and back! We need to get there to get visas for Mongolia. If we don't manage that, we can enjoy Lake Baikal. Perfect. We leave on the 12th of October, and get back on the 25th... wish us luck!

What else... oh yeah, it was Nadia's birthday yesterday (my hostess's daughter) which was interesting... there was a lot of beer. I was surprised it wasn't vodka, and secretly kind of glad - given the hangover I have today, if it had been vodka I think I would have been very ill...

It started off all very civilised with a meal (there were prawns! Well I found that exciting) and three 2 litre bottles of beer between 4 of us. Then there was cake (provided by me, cos I'm good like that) and then I ended up going out with Nadia and her friends to drink beer in a school yard.

Yet again I wrote out a huge amount of detail about what we did, and yet again I lost it, this time when saving it... why can the page not be found!? I think I'm just going to write everything out in an email to Rob from now on, and he can post it for me. Sorry everyone, but it's now 6.30, I want to go home and recover from my hangover and I'm annoyed that I've just spent at least half an hour on this only to lose it because Russian computers don't like me.

(Note to self: write about the rest of Nadia's birthday, the ballet and Divnogorsk)