Snow is falling….(not)

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the last blog post of the term. As you can probably tell, we have no snow, but it does seem to be very bright today, which means that it will actually get light, which is a vast improvement on yesterday and the past few days! It has also been quite cold.

We celebrated Christmas is style last night, with our International Christmas Party, which the Vision team helped us to host. One girl said that she now wants to follow Jesus, which is great news! We had about 50 students there in total. There was a meal, a quiz, and some descriptions of what Christmas is like around the world, combined with lots of general merriment.

After the party, the girls headed up to the banya, which is a Russian sauna, but better. Basically you have the sauna part, and then you have a really cold pool to jump into, and then you go back between the two until your time runs out. You feel so clean afterwards! I made a bit of a prat of myself though, as there was also a shower in there, with another shower joined on which was a special “massage” shower. I tuned it on, to see what it was like, but I only turned one lever, which happened to be the hot one. I got out from under the scalding water in time, but then had to puzzle out how to turn it off – you could barely even see the lever through the steam… I got the ladle for pouring water onto the coals, and used that in the end, but it was a bit close really! I don’t think people are going to allow me to forget that for a while.

On Sunday night, my friend Tanya took me to see a ballet called Ondine at the Mariinski theatre – it was really amazing! I think the standard of even the little kids was even much better than anything we have in England. In the interval, we got to stand in the Tsar’s box and take some pictures. I hope we can go again sometime!

Right, I think that that is about all I can think of for the moment. I’m sure that we have done loads more, but at the moment it has escaped my mind!

I hope that you all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

lots of love

Sarah

xxxx