Cold weather

Someone told me the other day that he has never seen the kind of warm weather in Moscow for the past few weeks this late into the year.  Well, today the streak looks like it might be over.  It is basically at 0 degrees today (Celsius).  When I took a photo outside there was a brief warm spell into positive temperatures: 2 degrees.

The forecast into next week, in a word, sucks: rain, heavy rain, drizzle, and snow.

If you don't wear appropriate clothing for this weather, you can get a glassy look on your face.  See below what a customer at a cafe not far from IUM looks like without wearing a coat or, apparently, any pants:

On the blackboard is an announcement for an "awesome business lunch" (бизнес-ланч = biznes lanch). The name of the cafe -- Zhurfak -- is a contraction of "Journalism Faculty", although there is no school of journalism nearby so I don't understand the point of the name. The bottom of the cafe's website has a link to the Journalism faculty of Moscow State, but their coordinates are not close.

The way the word Zhurfak is formed out of Zhurnalistika and Fakultet occurs with other disciplines: the physics department at Moscow State is called fizfak and the department of mechanics and mathematics at Moscow State is called Mekhmat.  It's a pretty general phenomenon in Russian that a phrase containing several already existing words is turned into a single new word by combining the first parts of each word: государственная дума = gosudarstvennaya duma (one of the houses of parliament) becomes госдума = gosduma, специальная служба = spetsialnaya sluzhba (government intelligence folks) becomes спецслужба = spetssluzhba, тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками = toroidalnaya kamera s magnitymi katushkami becomes токамак = tokamak (a tool for plasma physics research which also illustrates a nice application of mathematics: a torus admits nonvanishing vector fields).  Here's a bank name exhibiting this phenomenon:

The name Россельхозбанк = Rosselkhozbank comes from parts of three words: Российский Сельскoхозяйственный Банк = Russian Agricultural Bank and the long second word comes from two words (сельское хозяйство).  This particular kind of word formation seems, in my experience, to occur a lot more in Russian than in English, although I don't know if it has any special name.