We arrived at Beijing airport and were picked up by our tour guide and taken to our hotel. This was really handy as we were shattered after our flight and navigating around Beijing on our own would not have been easy!! The hotel was lovely, our room was massive compared to the cupboard room we were just in, it even had a PC in it! ( I was extremely impressed by the PC in the room, I suspect Grant thought I was a bit TOO impressed by it, but considering that we ...

Russia observations.... Young people in Russia were all very nice. People in St Petersburg were a bit friendlier than those in Moscow. Young people talk about how the younger generation will demand a different government, where as the older generation seem happy with their lot. The country doesn't seem as oppressed (dictated to) as it is believed to be, we even had one of our tour guides take the piss out of Putin and then laugh and say don't worry we're ...

The train journey was pretty cool, the train was comfortable and was separated into little cabins so was quiet. I was looking forward to seeing more of Russia out of the window but in reality the train mostly went through countryside so apart from a lot of forests and tiny little settlements dotted about (randomly all with satellite dishes, but no roads or cars) there wasn't much to see. We arrived at our hostel at 9pm and was shown to our 'bedroom'. The word be...

When we arrived in St Petersburg it was a lovely sunny day. We managed to find a bus at the airport to take us to town and after getting off at the wrong stop, even managed to get a metro train to near our hotel without too much trouble. Our hotel was on the 5th floor of an old building and consisted of 15 or so little apartments. We had a studio apartment which meant we could save some money and make our own food. We were pleased to find the hotel was in an exc...

After a hectic day trying to fit everything I own in my backpack, only to realise I was going to have to carry it around on my back for 5 months, we're were off! We headed to Heathrow travel lodge then found the nearest pub for our last English meal and a well deserved glass of wine. 6.30am the next day we're up and heading to the airport, a quick 7 hours later and we're in St Petersburg!