Best Eastern Russia Hotel Ufa

... plough through our noodles whilst reading & chatting. We watched a bit of The Simpsons on Sam's laptop, followed by a documentary series called Wild China. We all had an early night, exhausted from our hard day!

14.11 - We started traveling through time zones by this day, so we were all rather confused as to what time it was. We actually woke up at about 3pm local time! After eating 'breakfast'/'lunch' of, yes that's ...

... be more convenient. Also I believe this is my first all-nighter in a while. It's 3:43 AM and I'm still working on writing down all of this material. Good thing I only have the sternum and the thoracic cage left.

All in all this week has been great. I've met a lot of new people, and continued to push myself to the limit. I know it's going to get a lot harder before it gets any easier, but as of today I'm prepared to deal with all of this.

And before ...

... good doctors! One girl who lives in a "village" near Ufa was telling me how horrible her local hospital is and how she can't wait to get her "upper" degreee and start working there. And that got me thinking as to why I want to become a doctor, and I think it's because I want to help people find out what's wrong. Every case seems like a puzzle, and only a well-trained doctor can put it together.

Just if you're ...

... para at 10:30 was English. Luckily this was good for me because I was freed from any obligation to attend lessons for the next month. What can I say, being bilingual finally paid off. After English I had a quick lunch with a girl from my group in a bistro called Lido. I think they had bad salads....actually I'm very sure they had bad salads. That's about it for today's news. I'll update in a few days, but for now I'm off to study the neck, chest, and other vertebrae.

... what peculiar people we were..
A lovely drive through the Urals, lots of trees. We hadn't seen trees for weeks so it was a nice change. Then it had to happen, waved down by the traffic police who wanted some cash. As our Scottish mates explained, we should never pay them cash so we were courteous and polite whilst firmly refusing to pay. And patient too - in the end we were told to 'go home'!
Did a spot of honey ...

Sheesh. I thought Mondays in America were rough. Today....was not a good day. Louisa and I were up ALL NIGHT LONG last night...we just couldn't get to sleep! It was a little noisy outside, and in the building, or maybe it was just sleeping in a new place, but every two hours or so she'd say, "Are you still awake?" and I'd say, "Yup." After a while, we decided to make the best of it and did some class reading, read our guidebooks and made a list of everything in the city that we ...

... to host me: www.couchsurfing.com Since i letft Ireland all most 3 weeks ago, i only been sleeping in couchsurfers places.Of course for free, that's the idea behind this website, but the most amazing part, it's the people you meet.....to be honest there is no words to explain it...you should try it....you won't believe what people have done for me, and they knew me only for few hours....I find myself in some ...

... down the river (and saw 4 more brides) to St Isaac's (closed on Weds thank God) and Kazan catherdral which is dedicated to our Lady of Kazan - a Russian Knock I gather. There's a good market behind the 'bloody church' as they call it. Then it time for beer in the sun and a look in some designer shops and dinner 'The Idiot' on Moyki 82 which named after Dostoevsky's novel as he frequented this establishment, and it had yummy vege comfort food. Then we had lovely romantic walk home ...

All going well. Lots of touring and sightseeing. Went out on Saturday to some place in town called the Metro Club (if anyone's interested) which was very good. A few stories but nothing that can be said here. The town really is brilliant and we are sad to leave although Moscow should be good too. We leave tonight at half ten and have only a six hour train journey to Moscow. We have beds but I'm sure their use will be limited.

... that the customs form they gave us on the plane was all in Russian. They did have a nice set of instructions to walk you through the form but that of course was in German. I figured it out finally but this was the least of my worries. I arrived at customs and waited on a very long line until finally I was up. All was going well except that every time the woman entered my visa info the system would reject it. Darn those pre programmed applications! It wouldn't accept a date earlier ...