Thank you everyone for all your birthday greetings - really cheered me up! On the one hand celebrating in the middle of Russia during such an amazing adventure is mind-blowingly great, but on such days home-sickness does threaten. You all helped me have a wonderful time though, despite the realisation that yesterday was the first day of the second half of my life (3 score years and 10, etc.) - ouch!
I had a wonderful day, with Ellen and Oksana waking me with choclate cake - the only sensible breakfast - followed by a day out on the outskirts of town, walking through gorgeous woodland and a huge lake. And I even managed to fall down some rocks ALL BY MYSELF, landing on exactly the same body parts as I did when I fell out of the bus. Who said you couldn't repeat it if you tried?!
Today I realised, while trying to send some unneeded things back to Blighty, that the Russian postal system is constructed along the same principles as their ecclesiastical architecture - i.e. baroque and labarynthine. Particularly when it comes to breakables. The post-babushka was pushing the mug I was trying to send back (and which she didn't want to post) towards me an inch across the counter when she though I wasn't looking. I of course did the same when I thought she wasn't looking. This went on for over half an hour, and I needn't say who won. Sod tsars, first-secretaries, and generals, Russia is and always has been run by little old ladies, be them from behind a postal counter or (more commonly) as provodnitsas on the trains. They know everything, and like chess grand-masters hold all the strategic aces. You cannot function in this country if they do not want you to! Ask ye not 'is Putin any better than Yeltsin' - it doesn't matter. Ask rather 'how can I not annoy the provodnitsas too much' and you may just survive. Off to Novosibirsk tonight, and from then south to the Altay mountains - hoorah!