What a lovely day I've had today. I started off by going out for an early morning walk to retrace the steps of the orientation tour of Riga. I walked up the street from the hotel, stopping to have a proper look at the Russian Orthodox church and noticing fleeting patches of snow on the ground, melting into the contrasting green grass. I passed the Freedom Monument and the Opera theatre where Mikhail Baryshnikov made his debut. I entered the old town and wa...

I woke up to find that the snow had continued all night and was now about a foot deep on top of everything. Bushes, cars, trucks, the footpath all covered in white powder. This morning I redid the walking tour for some of the passengers who didn't make it out yesterday. Sara came along to evaluate my performance. I didn't think I did that badly, I didn't get lost which was a good start, considering I'd only done the route once, but there was definitely room...

We left our hotel in St Petersburg today at 8am and headed back to the bus station to catch our bus to Tallinn, Estonia. We boarded the bus at 9am and it took us about 7 hours to get there. The bus was amazing, it had power sockets and free wifi….makes the old Greyhound bus I usually get down to Canberra look obsolete. We crossed the border between Russia and Estonia about two hours in, at Ivangorod. Most of us went through smoothly, except Ying who is Ma...

After the epic day that was yesterday, I managed to get a bit of a sleep in before going off and redoing my walking tour. I set out up the street, past the victory church with its bright blue domes and stars on the roof, next passing by St Nicholas church…the patron of sailors and painted pastel blue in colour…again with gold domes. I passed by the Marlinsky theatre where the ballet is held, past the vodka museum and then reaching the biggest gold dome in...

This morning I woke up just as I was pulling into a different city….the city of St Petersburg and its supposed to be snowing and Sara and I have to walk eleven people through the metro with all their luggage and then walk to the hotel in it. Wonderful. It was actually much easier than it sounds, the metro system in St Petersburg is written in English as well as Cyrillic for a start and is very well sign posted compared to Moscow. Additionally, when we reac...