London-Moscow

Hi everyone! My name is Lola and I am extremely excited to be joining the team of amazing bloggers at Liden and Denz!

I will be spending the next couple of months studying Russian at the Liden and Denz center in Moscow. Alongside my daily Russian lessons, I will be getting re-acquainted with the city that I unwittingly fell in love with two years ago.

Me and Chekhov having a moment

Last year I graduated from the University of Birmingham with a degree in Russian and International Relations. My decision to study Russian was greatly informed by my interest in Russian history and culture, especially literature. At university I took a Russian literature module, and was immediately enthralled by many of the classics including Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time.

In my third year of study I was lucky enough to live in Moscow for a year, although ‘lucky’ was not a word I would have used at the time. I wish I could say that it was love at first sight with Moscow, but ours was a ‘slow-burn’ romance. However the idiosyncrasies that initially had me wanting to jump into the Moscow River and swim away, are now part of the city’s charm and make amazing anecdotes. It also doesn’t hurt that the architecture is beyond stunning, that there’s an abundance of amazing art galleries and museums, and there’s Georgian food. God, I love Georgian food…

I’m incredibly grateful for opportunity to write about my love of Russian culture and language, and to study at Liden and Denz. Hopefully I’ll one day be fluent and those headaches caused by the myriad of grammatical rules will be a thing of the past. Wish me luck!

Lola, currently studying Russian at Liden & Denz Moscow.