I’ve had the honour to make the acquaintance of the officially most effective alarm clock, the only one that can get me out of bed within 10 seconds: the fire alarm! When at 5.25 am the alarm went off and some woman screamed through the intercom to leave the rooms and head for the emergency exits, I jumped up, woke the other girls, opened the door, saw nothing but smoke, ran back into my room, took my bag, laptop and documents (no point in staying alive without these things, according to my subconscious), dragged the girls out of their room (one of them ran back to go and get her contact lenses – What??? Apparently there are people who would risk their lives for those things because they don’t look as good with glasses), ran to the exit and ended up in front of a locked door. Realising we couldn’t go back up, seeing that’s where the fire was, I felt a panic attack coming up. But nothing left to do than to run up to our floor again and hope we can make it to the other exit. When we got up their one of the security guys said that the fire had already been put out. That day in class the boys, who couldn’t seem to hold back their laughter, told us they’d had another party that evening and apparently one of the drunken guests thought it necessary to go cooking at 5 in the morning. So that’s how it all began, in the kitchen 10 meters from my room… Funny??? Hadn’t it been for that big fire 3 months ago at another faculty, which cost ten’s of students their lives, the state wouldn’t have ordered to install those smoke detectors at the dorm and it would probably have been a very deadly joke. So no, you don’t see me laughing…
Apart from this, the past 2 weeks existed mainly of culture, parties, cold feet and Russian smelling-broad-chested-machos-with-horrible-haircuts.
As I had been in bed for almost 2 weeks, I felt I had to make up for all that lost time and, believe me, I did. In a week’s time I visited 5 museums: Chekhov House-Museum, Pushkin House-Museum, Gorky Museum, the State Armoury (my absolute favourite, btw) and the New Tretyakov Gallery. Next to that I often just wandered around in town and meanwhile visited some churches, cathedrals, state buildings, monasteries and parks (it still hits me when I see such a ridiculously large country estates in the middle of a city). Believe it or not, but the last day of 2007 we spent on a cemetery where some of the most famous Russian historical figures are buried. For example, we saw the graves of Gogol, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Gorbatchov, Stalin’s wife, etc. No worries, I won’t go further into detail, I suppose photos will say much more than my lengthy writing…
So that leaves us with the parties. Obviously, we had happy ones, but also a whole lot of goodbye-parties. Lots of students left during the last few weeks, some to come back after the holidays, others never to return at all. A list of every one who has left me and Moscow: Yves, Cedric, Petra, Julia, Sarah, the girls from Gent, the German girls/guy, the Italians, the Finnish girls, and so many more. Honestly, I’ll really miss them all, we had a truly great time! On the 8th of January the 3 last girls from Brussels will return home as well, leaving me on my own to represent our beloved country. My King and yet non-existing government (you see, I’m only gone for 5 months and everything falls apart in Belgium – hopefully not literary); you can count on me guys!
Anyhow, Russian life goes on… Let’s talk about the happy occasions. First of all – “HOHOHO” – Santa Claus came by to tell me what a good girl I’ve been the past year (no surprise, of course) and we thus welcomed Him with a small Christmas party. Considering in Russia Christmas is officially celebrated on the 7/8th of January, the 24/25th of December were just like all other days and I thus had to attend classes (apparently I was the only geek/idiot who thought this necessary, as I was practically all week alone in class…). But on Christmas Eve we saw our opportunity to enjoy a major meal and have a party. When I say “major” I do mean “maaaajor”. Unfortunately, I lost the count on the bottles of шампанское (read: champanskoye > isn’t Russian just too easy for our linguistic heads), but the number of courses reached up to 6½. I admit that “Comme Chez Soi” would provide 7 courses, but seeing we’re only poor students – still wet behind our ears – who have to cook their own Christmas dinner, I’d say we did pretty well. Anyway, the menu:1. some little snacks to get the party going.
2. a small aperitif: toast with salad, smoked salmon and caviar.
3. a bigger starter: cold pasta, a Caesar salad and monstrous scampi.
4. an entirely self-made pizza à la our German chef.
5. the main course: roasted chicken, a variety of warm vegetables and baked potatoes.
6. a delicious Christmas cake.
6½. around 3.00am we found our second breath and thus started all over again.
How’s that for a student’s meal? Only pretty faces and genius brains? I don’t think so! We Moscow students have proved to be true kings/queens of the kitchen! ;-)
So on the 25th of December I woke up with a major hang-over and had to spend 6 hours in class. Speaking of torture…
Moving on to the 26th: Мой день рождения! (Russian class, on request of D.) Or “my birthday”, for those who are not convinced. Even this festivity isn’t considered to be an official holiday over here, can you imagine? And yes, again I spent a few hours in class, but in the evening I cooked dinner and we had a nice little party.
On the 29th I had to pass on my crown to Maria, моя соседника - aka the girl next door, as it was her birthday. Meanwhile her parents and brother had arrived and we thus all celebrated together. In the evening we went ice skating on Red Square (Maria’s father was kind enough to take a picture of my first steps on the ice, after more than 6 years. BUT: I didn’t hit the ice once, although I must admit I’ll have to work on those pirouettes and double flips…) and had a delicious dinner at a lovely tradition Russian restaurant. 
And then all of the sudden it was already time to say goodbye to a wonderful 2007. On New Year’s Eve we decided to cook ourselves a delicious meal and for the countdown we relied on a bridge to show us all fireworks Moscow had to offer (Red Square was a no-go because of ten’s of thousands other Muscovites who had the same idea). After all those sparkles we were strongly advised to go back to the dorm and spend the rest of the night/morning celebrating there as Moscow is said to be one of the most dangerous cities on New Year, mainly owning to drunken Russians armed with all kinds of fireworks. And it turned out to be everything but an exaggeration, as the day after the newsreader had a hard time struggling through the list of incidents that had occurred that night. [The evil шампанское-creature is to blame for a lack of visual material of this night. Простите меня! – My apologies.]Right, I think I’ll go on freezing now… It has been between -10 and -16 degrees the last few days and apparently my heating thought this to be an appropriate time for a winter sleep. In addition, I kind of broke the handle of my window which means I can’t entirely close it anymore. And if one goes and asks those tough macho-security-dudes whether they can come and have a look, one can aspect the following answer: “Our handyman isn’t working during the holidays, but my room is nice and warm, девушка (girl)…”. May I introduce to you all; the Russian cool blokes!
All in all, spending the holidays here in Moscow was great fun and a nice experience. I’m really glad I persisted and decided to stay, although I must admit that realising how lovely it is to share such a days with family and friends made me miss home badly… But I’ll send of all you big telepathic kisses for now and when I return in February I’ll order another Santa Claus, another birthday and a new New Year. Lots of celebrations are yet to come, meaning a huge amount of kisses for Sarah!
До свидания, мои дорогие!
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