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
On April 16th this year, I suddenly realised that those eternal behemoths of days gone by might not be there forever, waiting for me to get around to visiting them and so Project #BeforeTheyBurnDown began. The very next morning I booked flights to visit the Sistine Chapel; that very weekend I went off to Winchester, … More A Pilgrimage to Canterbury: The Blogger’s Tale
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
Welcome to my first Russia blog! Over the next couple of months, I’ll take you along on my journey, which I’ve been calling #JulietsRussianOdyssey on Instagram. In this post, I’m going to cover a few of the themes from the trip: where I went, the language barrier, the weather and what it was like being … More So, I went to Russia…
More than ten years on, let’s have a look at my first ever solo travel trip. I was 23, which actually wasn’t as young as I felt at the time. I’d done quite a lot of travelling at university because I spent a year studying French in Switzerland and so I used all my free … More Suomenlinna: a day on Finland’s Fortress
I Am A Polar Bear 