29 August 2006 - St Petersburg, Russia

OK, so this blog has not turned out as we intended: a reliable up-to-date window on our travels complete with dozens of photos. Instead, it is quickly starting to sound like a confessional so we'll end this paragraph right now.

Russia has been an interesting place to visit. All the palaces and museums are fascinating to wonder at and explore. Of all our travels over the past few months this is where we feel the most like tourists - we are conspicuously overcharged and are not always presented with all the relevant information on sites of interest (often the information given is only in Russian). But we refuse to join tour groups, so we often imagine what life was like at a particular time, and occasionally decipher cyrillic signs (very satisfying). The general pleasures of travel are here, of course: friendly, helpful people ready to smile at your mishaps; good local food when you find it after searching across a city; breakthroughs in communicating people who cannot speak English.