After a tense border control, we had a few hours on the bus until St Petersburg. This bug had made its way on board and was floating around the girl in front of me. Despite her ruthless ways and best efforts to kill it, it kept getting back up. There`s me thinking in Russia, even the insects are solid. Anyway, time-wise everything was running smooth so I`d be pretty comfortable to check in to the hostel and make the all-important first meet. There were 8 of us on the trip, all solo travelers. Four Aussies, two other English and an Italian. Three of them were called Alex so nicknames were assigned at an uncomfortable rate. After the intro`s we kicked it off with some decent tours with the honch and went out with two of the Alex`s to a couple bars and a club. The club was lively and full of laughing gas, anything to get the Russians smiling…

We were up pretty early the next day as we had an hour and a half of buses and trains to reach Peter Hoff. Can`t say it would`ve been that enjoyable if it wasn`t for the guy next to me who was nodding off and kept banging his head on the seat in front every time the driver applied his harsh breaks. With the bus being so packed though, he definitely felt my silent laughter as my body bounced next to him. Peter Hoff covers an insane amount of land and involved a lot of walking, but looked amazing. A group vote led us to the ballet that evening, which is quite a thing in St P. We had a choice of two and went for Swan Lake. Wasn`t a bad one, though I probably caught more of what was going on with the music than the ballet/story itself.

The morning after we`d wake and head to what I`ve been told is the best museum in the world, The Hermitage, and it didn`t disappoint. You could quite easily spend 8 hours in there, unfortunately we just had the 2 as we had to cram in St Isaac`s and the museum of preserved fetuses which was pretty disturbing! That night we boarded our overnighter to Moscow and bid farewell to our first honch, who chased the train down the platform。A scene that wouldn`t look out of place in Hollyoaks latest.