2014 Russia

This was very exciting.  We had been promising ourselves a trip to the The Hermitage museum in Leningrad for many years.  The city even changed its name to St Petersburg in the meantime to confuse us, but eventually we got organised and went.  To make it even better our long-time friend Pam came with us.  

We stayed at the Hotel Dostoevsky, and walked up and down Nevsky Prospekt as if we were in a Dostoevsky story.  We prepared for the visit though - Kate reading guide books and Mike reading Gogol (less useful it has to be said). 

We even downloaded an app to teach us the cyrillic alphabet, and Phil lent us a load of useful stuff (although the “Learning Russian” course didn’t get much of a look-in). We did watch the Eisenstein film  “Ten Days That Shook The World” that showed the storming of the Winter Palace (where the Hermitage is now).

Unfortunately the Cruiser Aurora had moved, for the first time in about 40 years!

Pam and the Winter Palace.

One of the huge canals in St Petersburg.