I think this dates from December some time. Apologies for the delay in typing it up.

"Crack-Your-Arse", where we forgot that "plunge" is not generally understood in common parlance, at least not the way the Russians use it.

Lucy fell down a manhole. It was Philly's fault really. They were playing with snow, Lucy was running away, and I was hiding at a safe distance. Having felt rather silly walking around manhole covers the whole time we've been here, we now understand why we were advised to do so. As Lucy planted her foot on an innocent-looking piece of snow, the manhole cover beneath flipped, and Lucy's right leg was swallowed up. Her left leg, luckily, saved the day. Lucy has still not forgiven me for asking if the lunch had survived (she was carrying it) before checking she was alright. The lunch was flung 3 metres to the South. At the time, we found the incident rather comic, albeit rather frightening. It was only later that we discovered that Lucy had had a close brush with her own funeral - manholes can be up to 10m deep, and have either deep sewage or deep boiling water at the bottom. Lucy says she can think of other ways she'd prefer to die than being boiled in sewage. Philly says she probably wouldn't have died, just broken one or two of her legs.

The very next day, Lucy fell over on a bus. It was Nick's fault this time. He rang her at one of the most crucial moments for holding on tight - the corner between Lenin Street and Kopilovksy Bridge (we call it the Killer Corner - on the same spot, Philly flew off her seat into the aisle, in full view of all the other passengers). Lucy lost concentration and crashed, screaming, into the door. Twice. I rather pathetically flailed and tried to grab her. We both screamed and laughed rather loudly for rather a long time, and the other 60 passengers all remained in stony silence.

Two days prior to The Day Of Trauma, Elena Nikolaevna told us we had to do a presentation at an international students conference. Notice the lack of apostrophe where you thought there ought to be one. I know what I'm doing here… When we cross-examined her for more information, we eventually gleaned that a PowerPoint presentation on Durham would be sufficient, but we should also have a stand with pictures of England on it. So away we slaved for 2 days, producing a rather amateur presentation in rather amateur Russian. The stand we produced had a pitiful offering of postcards, calendars, a Union Jack and a chocolate soda cake. We arrived on the day and found that, other than Germany, all the other nationalities represented (except China, but do they count?) were former republics of the USSR; other than the Germans, everyone else had produced highly impressive stands; other than the Germans, everyone else's presentations included a dance troupe performing a national dance, a choir performing national songs, and fluent Russian speaking in presentations about their country as a whole, not just their city. In fact, the only way in which the Germans differed from us was that most of them had grown up in Kazakhstan and therefore spoke fluent Russian - those of them who didn't were not put on the stage. So we were the only ones speaking Russian badly. I like to think I saved the day by saying the name of that place in Wales with a stupidly long name over a microphone to 200 people. In fact the laughter and applause was more likely to have been a mixture of pity and derision.

While waiting to commence our embarrassment on the stage, not only did we seriously consider running away (we were 2nd last, so knew full well what were following) - Nick thinks he got propositioned by a gay Armenian. When telling Tatiana about this two days later, hitting his cupped palm twice with his fist, he said "I wanted to…". To an English person, this gesture would generally indicate a punch in the face. To a Russian (as we discovered from Tatiana's outburst), it means exactly what Nick thought the Armenian was after.

To make the day better, we were given a cake as we exited the stage. Now, Russian cake is a rather interesting phenomenon - it contains very little cake, and is made mostly of brightly coloured, fluorescent whipped cream, usually a fair amount of jelly in bad flavours, and iridescent pieces of mock fruit. Lucy has been treated to a purple cake (more than once, by the mother of a short, fat, bald 36-year-old who wants to marry her, or indeed, romantically, any of us, so that he and his mother can get British passports). We wisely bought ourselves a cake tin very early on so we could make "nice" cake ("nice" because it normally tasted very strongly of baking soda - it took us a long time to learn the very complex word for baking powder). The Russians insisted our cake was pie, because there was no cream involved. Returning to the heartfelt cake we were given - all the cream was off. This would not have been such a tragedy had we not had it straight after a lunch of the most horrific pizza the world has ever known. It seemed to have burned stray dog on it.

Having discovered that our lessons at university were not adequate (approximately one-third in English), we decided to enlist the help of our friends from the gulag. They arranged a 24-hour Russian plunge for us. This included a very good looking married man asking me what sex was. Embarrassing moment. The day was genuinely excellent - we finally understand verbs of motion, and have vowed to spend the rest of our lives posting assorted fancy dress articles to our gulag friends. They have become some of our closest friends in Krasnoyarsk.

Staying with our gulag friends - Lucy and I went with them back to the gulag for a children's English plunge. They were aged 13-17, and there was much discussion of Roman Abramovich. I sneakily snuck away from the theme of transport, and taught them all to sing The Twelve Days Of Christmas, and to recite Jabberwocky with much over-acting. The weekend also involved me swapping identities with the aforementioned married man; I still have his soul, mwahaha…

Banya. We went to one. For those of you who don't know what it is, it is basically a dry sauna with a freezing cold plunge-pool (or a snow drift if you are in a village) just outside. Philly didn't have a swimming costume, so went in her underwear. Note to the public: we didn't go to a public banya with lots of fat men drinking vodka, we rented a banya which gave us 4 rooms for our own private use, joined together by saloon-style swing doors. Lucy got upset because her face got too hot; I refused to jump in the plunge-pool because it was too cold; all in all, Philly was the only one who truly enjoyed herself. It was excellent relaxation from the outside temperature of -25 degrees Celcius (the first time we went - minus 32 the second time). In a banya, you have to cover your hair because otherwise the heat damages it; they provide special hats for the purpose, and they are the most comedy thing I have ever seen. Oh and mustn't omit to mention - we hit each other with birch twigs - apparently it opens the pores.

We decided to post some belongings home, having discovered DHL were going to charge us around £200 each. For a price experiment, Philly posted 4 books home. It took an hour and a half, multiple forms and duplications of them, queuing three times, and cost nearly £30 for 3Kg. So we abandoned that idea and have thrown ourselves on the mercy of excess baggage charges.

A brief tidy-up of the last few days: we held an "English style drinks and nibbles Christmas party" for all of our local friends - about 40 people turned up in total, but we didn't realise that a large proportion of those coming were from Church, and most Russian Christians Do Not Drink. Anything. Ever. So our large pans of mulled wine were lost on them, despite our explanations that there really wasn't any alcohol in it anymore. Nevermind. Luckily we also had large quantities of soft drinks. Vegetables and dips confused them - who would ever choose to eat raw vegetables? For fun? And dip them in a cold sauce? And what on earth is this horrible stringy thing they call celery??? All in all the party was a success, if a highly comic one.

Our 3-day train journey (2nd class) was a much more enjoyable (although I'm not sure that's really the right word) experience than the trip back from Irkutsk. We had a 25 year old Russian woman making up the 8th place in our two lockable cabins, and luckily we got along very well with her. Unexpectedly, we all had massive culture shock upon arriving in Moscow, but managed to have a pretty good 48 hours none the less. We were indeed caught out by excess baggage charges, but it was still significantly cheaper than any of the other options. Since being back in England, we are still all struggling to speak "real" English, or even to stay in English at all. "Spas" and "privetik" make frequent occurrences in my vocabulary.