Ho!  If you say so, of course, Reiner.
Cheers

Sorry, S/W - I was just saying how very happy I was to see the back of this bleedin' snow  4-5 months per year of it is really more than adequate for me :-)

Of course we now have an unpleasant week or so in which 4 months accretion of deep-frozen dog-poo and the occasional corpse emerge from under the huge piles of snow all over the city.   But once that is over, and the vast pool of water has drained away, life returns to normal   For one thing I shall be glad to be rid of the 5-minute ritual of dressing to impersonate Captain Oates every time I want to pop out for a pint of milk

We might still get a bit more snow, Simon - March is still officially the winter, although hopefully it won't settle. It won't really be "Spring" until the end of April, and it won't be warm enough to go out without a coat until May... after which it suddenly switches-over to our traditional broiling summers, when I will complain how unbearably hot it is!   (In 2005 we had a whole week of +38C in July).

Hi T-P

Although the amount of new housing projects around Moscow is growing,  you can still get out into the countryside fairly easily :-)  I live at Belorusskaya so I have Leningradskoe Chaussee right on my doorstop... and once you get past the heavy traffic headed for MegaMall, Metro, IKEA and Scheremetevo Int'l Airport,  you're quickly into the countryside.  Some friends of mine moved full-time to their dacha (well, it's called a "dachny poselok" but it looks like a suburban development in any British town!) at Chiornaya Gryaz' (what a delightful name!  ) and there's real authentic forest there (and lots of authentic mosquitoes) just an hour from Moscow.

In 2005 I was doing a project in Vladimir (2.5 hours drive from Moscow), near to the medieval "museum-preserve" hamlet of Suzdal.  This is absolutely in the countryside, and in Suzdal the ducks still walk around the smaller streets and lanes.  We went mushroom-picking (I am useless at this, одние паганы, so I was put in charge of gathering blueberries and whortleberries instead, and organising the picnic lunch) a few times with the cast    No, I wasn't staging LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, before someone asks ;-)   They have a super Philharmonia there,  built-up from nothing (well, almost nothing - when he came there was a String Quintet and a Madrigal Choir) by a dynamic conductor called Artem Markin,  one of Moussin's pupils.  He's built an orchestra to rival any of the Moscow orchestras, and increasingly they're bringing their concerts to Moscow for performances.  If you'd like my recipe for a perfect June day, then I recommend sightseeing of medieval Suzdal in the morning, forest picnic lunch and mushroom-picking, then Mechetina playing the Scriabin concerto in the evening, followed by a mushroom supper :-)   

The only drag about Vladimir is that there's no good road to get there, and you spend an hour in traffic jams driving through the horrible light-industrial suburb of Balashikha (I don't know how it was when you lived here T-P, but now it's about 5km of DIY warehouses, garden-centres, McDonalds (two! one at either end of the place), etc.  After this the road goes through places with names like "Long Beards" and "Cockerels", so you can imagine what they're like

PS for T-P... HarmonyHarmony needs your recipe for piroshkie in the "Is something burning" thread 

Perhaps four months of snow would cure me of my love for it. We don't get enough here. Children go crazy if they see an inch of it. Wet gloves on the radiators and very over-excited children.