Russian Lessons

Our classroom buddies

Well we are now six whole weeks into our Russian lessons, and finally they are feeling less like slow torture and more like fun! It has been a real experience to throw ourselves into learning Russian, and the first few weeks were real hard work. Because there is only one two hour lesson each week we cannot afford to take our time and are having to dig deep into our mental reserves (Jenny says she has some of these). So within ten minutes of our first lesson we were reading Russian, in the full Cyrillic Alphabet. Each lesson is a challenge that needs not only 100% attention at the time, but a further 4 or 5 hours hard work afterwards. But now we are starting to feel the benefit of the initial effort.

Because the course is run at Southampton University we have coursework and even an exam! The first piece of coursework has been completed and we will be receiving our next one on Wednesday. Although the course is very time consuming and hard work we would recommend doing it to anyone, especially those contemplating going traveling through foreign lands. We will certainly be signing up for the 2nd course which begins in February.

The other advantage of the course being at the University is we now both have student unions cards, which give us lots of discounts, including a years gym membership for £85!

Our teacher - Olga



Website Improvements

It has taken quite a while, but finally Ollie has updated the Route section of the website so there are now interactive Google maps on each country page. Once again Google Analytics had highlighted the fact that a lot of our website visitors were viewing these pages and we felt we needed to give these visitors more information. Google Maps is just out of the beta mode, but it felt still in it, and was quite hard to work with. But the results are pleasing and certainly add another dimension to these pages. Our next ambition for these pages is to work through our guide books and find places of interest to visit, and update each page and map with this information.

Ollie has found out that he cannot view the embedded Google Maps via his work firewall, although if he clicks the 'View larger map' link he can access the maps in Google. As we need to find out how many people can view these, if you cannot see the maps drop us an email so we know.

Sponsorship

Ollie has been continuing his training for JOGLE, and completed the Great South run recently. His next training effort will be The Grim 8, which he completed in last year, alongside Jenny and some friends. Unfortunately Ollie was out on Friday, training with Jenny, and turned his ankle. He is now hobbling about whilst Jenny has had to continue her training on her own, including a mammoth effort to do a six mile run in the howling rain today. Ollie was gutted to stay inside, drinking tea, eating toast, watching sport. Absolutely gutted.