A friend of mine who teaches English at PGU (Petrozavodsk State University) says he'd be delighted to put you in touch with one or two of his students to exchange messages in English. If your Russian is good enough, you can write in Russian as well. The University is at http://www.karelia.ru).

To make contact, send a message (with "For Mikhail Oshukov" in the subj. line) either to the department e-mail address, germanic@mainpgu.karelia.ru or else to Misha's personal address, oshukov@karelia.ru. In the message you can give as much information as you'd like about yourself and your interests, but it's probably best to keep it under fifteen or twenty lines since longer messages are occasionally truncated.

I've sometimes had trouble getting through to other addresses at PGU itself, so if you write to "germanic" and don't get an answer after a few days, write to Misha at home. Note too that sometimes the e-mail isn't checked as often you'd expect -- in some departments the secretary does it every few days and prints out messages to deliver to various recipients on paper, so they never even have their hands on a computer. If you write in English, there's no need to do any special encoding or font selection.

If you want information about Cyrillic encoding, see the Home Page of more information.