28 days later...

...The virus is spreading.

Merry Christmas to you and your family

Who needs expensive gaming systems and fancy gifts for Christmas? All you need is warm clothes and a piece of plastic to have fun in this town.
Merry Christmas. I am taking off. Talk to you next year,

Sculptures at the mall

Houston has its rodeo, New Orleans has its Mardi Gras, and Akademgorodok has its "snow sculpture at the mall" festival. No steak, no more alcohol than usual, but a bunch of nice sculptures taking shape right under the lens of my camera. May this blog help this great event getting the international attention it deserves.
Happy holidays to all of you,

A new bar in town

A new pub (type lounge) has opened in Akademgorodok. It is called Nikuda. Someone told me about the subtle pun in the name, but I forgot. Beside its well chosen name, it also has the good initiative to offer "Buy 3 Stella get 1 free". Much less subtlety in that aspect, but very well thought too. It feels like they designed their business model to fit the profile of most of my dear readers. Combined with the usual Sambucca, it is a very good option for a late night drink. They have live bands and a staff of about 3 times the optimal size to run the place efficiently.
I can't emphasize enough that you have to come visit to check out all these good places.

Trees from my street

The place is really getting pretty with snow and frost on the trees. A temperature of about -12C ensures that it stays that way. So, since I fell lazy to do any skiing or skating this week end, I just went out and took of few pictures of trees, the easiest thing to find in Akademgorodok.
All these trees are in my street, (Zolotodalunskaya Ulitsa). I hope they will fill your house with a bit of Christmas spirit.

Hockey

My first hockey game turned out to be quite fun. Some key pictures of that event are pasted here... As you can see, I suck pretty bad at it, but that was expected. It will come with time and practice. In the mean time, make sure you wear shinguards when I am on the icerink. You can view more pictures in the slideshow in the right hand side barre.


Shoot... I missed the puck.


Darn! Missed again.


An error in the defense (composed of me) lead to a dramatic goal.

Havannah club kills brain cells

Last night was my first night out in a club in Novosibirsk. I went to Havannah club with a bunch of friends (I did not know them all at the start of the evening, but I fixed that quite well). Havannah club is a cuban club as its name indicates. Well, for a cuban club, they had good vodka and good stella artois. As a good companion, I drank to be social, (that was needed because there was a significant language barrier) but at the rate we drank, I inadvertently skipped the warning sign that indicates the dangerous crossing from social drinking to getting wasted. I blew off the language barrier in the process, along with a few brain cells.
I recommend Havannah club to anyone coming to Novosibirsk. They first serve a very good dinner, and then there is a show w/ very good dancers around midnight, and then you can dance (the dancers stick around and they dance with you as well).
There is a very appreciated policy in the siberian club that says "we don't close until the last customer leaves". I did not believe that in the first place, so we stayed just to check that it was true. We finished up at 5:30am and jumped in a taxi to go back home.

I learned yesterday that my favorite local drink TAMOUGA was actually called Sambucca. Major disappointment. We had some of course, but they were not as good as in Moscow... The waitress was obviously a novice at serving sambucca and she lit up the drinks with our straws in the glass. The melting point of a plastic straws being quite low, the straws melted and shrunk at the bottom of the glass. We drank it anyway.


Can't wait to try other places. If you are dropping by for a visit, I'll show you those good clubs of Novosibirsk.