In 2019 I went off on my Russian Odyssey, three weeks travelling between Moscow, St Petersburg, Murmansk, Ekaterinburg and Perm, seeing the sights, seeing the Arctic, sampling the delights of the Imperial era and the more dubious delights of the Soviet era, getting my first ever ride on the Trans Siberian Railway, visiting lots of churches and then writing lots of blog posts on the subject!
Do you want to know about visiting St Basil’s? Have you ever wondered what Russia’s Arctic port city really looks like? What’s it like to travel in the kupe class of long-distance trains? Just how easy is it to get around when you don’t speak Russian?
Come and follow my adventures on my Russian Odyssey!
Moscow and St Petersburg were pretty straightforward. They’re major world cities with good tourist infrastructure, I’d been to both of them before and I was staying in boring but predictable and safe international chain hotels. Murmansk was a little different. The first sign was that about 80% of the passengers on my plane were men.… More Finding options in Murmansk
I’m not a big museums fan. I’m not a high art or culture sort of person. At the risk of sounding like a brat, I’ve been to the Louvre, I’ve been to the Hermitage before. It’s not my thing. But in St Petersburg, I felt like I really should make the effort to go to… More A day at the Hermitage
There are two main churches to visit in St Petersburg, once you’re done with all the other delights like the Peter & Paul Fortress, the Hermitage labyrinth and more palaces than you can imagine, many of them now home to the sort of staples a big city like this needs more in the twenty-first century… More Great churches in St Petersburg
I love a boat trip. I nearly froze to death out on the river in Rīga in November two years ago, I went on three different boats in Malta earlier in the year, I did the canal boat in Amsterdam last year (another case of nearly freezing to death) and by the time you read… More A boat trip around St Petersburg
My first morning in St Petersburg was too hot by far and I got off to a bad start by having a pitched battle with a first a metro machine that refused to sell me a smartcard and then a metro machine that was extremely reluctant to sell me tokens. Add to that my local… More Peter & Paul Fortress: my first day in St Petersburg
It was the morning of my first Russian domestic voyage. I was starting small: Moscow to St Petersburg, but how to do it? It’s a short hop on a plane. When we did it on the school trip in 2002 we took the overnight train. But my mum, already delirious with panic over the idea… More The Sapsan high-speed train: a bullet on a coffee table
Of course, there’s so much more to Moscow than the Kremlin and Red Square and I’m really not the person to talk about it because I wasn’t there long enough to do much more than moon over the tourist centre but I do have three other things to talk about. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour… More Moscow: I also went to a cathedral and some parks
Going inside St Basil’s Cathedral is exciting but it’s not exciting like going into the Kremlin. Even though it’s a standard tourist thing to do in Moscow and a lot of it is now a museum complex, it stills feels illicit, transgressive, as if you’re breaking into a high-security spy headquarters where ordinary civilians, let… More The day I was incarcerated in the Kremlin
The most exciting moment of my entire Russia trip was on my penultimate evening when I walked up the Kremlevskiy Prospekt slope from the north-west corner of Red Square and saw that iconic view laid out before me. I was in Moscow twice. I spent three full days there are the beginning of the trip… More The labyrinth cathedral, the dead man and the legs
Last week I told you that I went to Russia and today we start the blogs in earnest. I currently have plans for 15-20 of them over the next four months – I did quite a lot while I was out there. So, day one, city one – welcome to Moscow! I arrived late afternoon… More Exploring the Moscow metro