Friday came and went and so did the man from Novgorod Telekom - without hooking up my Mac to the net.

It seems that only one modem salesman has ever hit this town. That would have been the D-Link man, and D-Link can’t or won’t do Mac drivers.

Novgorod Telekom’s man used the ‘N’ word a lot, which wasn’t very constructive. It also doesn’t help that Novgorod is generally dysfunctional in net terms.

There are just two Internet cafes in the centre. The first is pictured here. (If you’re really stuck, it’s Velikaya No 3, round the back.) It’s a fairly freezing cellar full of scrap PCs and few fridges that need mending too.

The other buzzing hub is located in a schoolroom just a short walk from Telekom building. This is only open after 4 pm and obviously you have no chance of a PC once school is out.

All of which had me casting around again for a Wi-Fi spot. Anyone? Finally I met a guy in an out of town cafe who said there were 3 Wi-Fi hot spots in Novgorod. The first he couldn’t remember, the second was the Public Library and the third was in the University.

I tried the Library first - a walk which took me once again past the statue of Lenya Golikov.

I’ve since discovered that Lenya was 17 and lived in the woods outside Novgorod during the Nazi occupation. There was a whole band of partisan schoolboys and they have a dedicated museum in the local technical college.

Behind Lenya you can catch a glimpse of Novgorod’s Stalin Empire architecture. Like many of Russia’s prestige buildings, these were constructed after 1945 by German prisoners of war, under the ‘you broke the china’ principle. Stalin didn’t worry too much about the Geneva conventions and many German POWs laboured until the mid fifties - basically until they dropped.

It transpired that the Library did not have Wi-Fi - no surprise there - but only after half an hour of filling up a form, presenting my passport and checking in my hat, coat and blah. The list of things you need a passport for in Russia only gets longer. It now includes getting a library ticket as well as, would you believe, a SIM card for your mobile.

So, on to Novgorod University. There’s not a lot you can say about this building. Except that, if you think it looks bad from the outside, wait until you see the interior - assuming your eyes can adjust to the gloom.

Still, at least there’s a feed here. Well, just about. The Wi-Fi zone has precisely one desk, two electricity points yet half a dozen Olympic ping pong tables.

As they say in Russia, ‘Go figure skate’.