Hey people, finally I've the finances, the plane tickets, visa and invitation sorted out for my next trip to Russia. On the 9th Feb I'll be flying into Moscow and then just a short 20 hour train journey and I'll be in Izhevsk near the Ural mountains! To be honest I'm well excited about it and looking forward to spending a month teaching the pupils at the local school and maybe squeeze in the odd adventure or two in the mountains, plus a bit of snowboarding.

A few days ago I arrived back in rainy old England after a great two weeks in Samara celebrating Christmas and New Year with all my friends and also getting some snowboarding in the half metre of snow that has fallen there. Was a bloody cold 2 weeks as the temp was most days about -17C. Almost succeeded in missing my plane both ways there and succeeded in missing my train in Moscow!

For months I've been planning a new website for all my Samara photos, and this weekend I finally finished making it. The 3 new pages have taken about nine hours to complete using a combination of Dreamweaver MX & Photoshop6. At present there's only 2 pages of photos - all from the river trip with Sasha & Yulia. However I'm planning to add some new galleries soon..