bond with the place. The traffic is horrendous and the fumes ?arh man they are bad, they don’t have unleaded petrol so the air is just awful. I don’t think I have ever seen so much traffic and the array of cars is unbelievable, they go from real top of the range posh things to the most battered old larders all battling for road space, there is quite a bit of horn papping but nothing that resembles English road rage - thank-fully!

We thought we would be meeting everybody from our trip on day 2 but we had a note to say that the meeting would be taking place on day 3 as most people were arriving quite late on so we had the whole day to explore the city ourselves. We took in a lot of the typical tourist sites, as always we just set off on foot and wandered, the array of building is incredible but I dunno, its hard to describe but the city just didn’t give me the buzz I thought it would, I was

earning to get into the countryside, and we had 2 more full days so I tried to like the city more. The first full day we had to explore it was grey drizzly rain to start with, so I guess we weren’t seeing the city in the best of lights. Palace square and the Hermitage building is incredible, the building are so huge shame about the never-ending traffic skirting the left hand corner but it is an awesome place. We walked and walked and walked so by around 5 o’clock we were knackered so we got a boat trip which gave a different kind of perspective on the place. Later on we went for a few drinks and then for a curry, really getting into the Russian experience!!!

Finally on day 3 we met up with everyone on our trip, there’s Noah our very funny Canadian tour leader, Penny the Kiwi, Aussie Jason and Chantay, and the rest are all English ?there’s Dot, Sophie and Mark, Sarah and John and Fiona