If you know a school that can get stranger than eating caviar (salty fish eggs) sandwiches for breakfast, having to change your shoes when you come in, drinking sweet tea with every meal and doing your homework at school, you’re pretty much abnormal.

Here’s a rough description of our daily routine. Firstly, there’s the shoe and clothes-changing horror, where we peel off layers of snow clothes and switch from snow boots to indoor sandals.

We have six lessons every day, all in Russian of course. Our subjects include maths, Russian language, literature and geography. When we arrived here last August (our dad works here), we knew hardly any Russian, but now we mostly understand it.

Our midday meal always consists of two courses – beetroot soup and then, usually, chicken. After lunch we have to tidy our lockers and then go out for “progulka”, or playtime, which means the outdoor shoes go back on. After play we do our homework and then have tea. There are all kinds of clubs we can go to including theatre or ceramics and, if we want, we can stay till 7pm.

We can assure you, it’s more than strange, it’s absolutely unimaginable!

Words by Ailis and Maeve Halligan