I got to St Petersburg at 0530 on the 2nd of August and met Chris at Vitebsk Station at about 0930. Once we had checked into our hostel we walked up Nevsky Prospect to the Hermitage and Dvortsovage Ploshehed. This is the main setting for the huge Winter Palace. in the centre of Dvortsovage Ploshehed (Palace Square) is Alexander Column, which is 47.5m high, and opposite the Winter Palace on the otherside of the square is the General Staff Building which is just as big as the Winter Palace!! As it was the first Thursday of the month it was free to enter the Winter Palace so me and Chris decided to go in and have a look about. It is massive!! After about 2 hours of wondering about we tried to get out but the Palace is so big it took us about half an hour to find the exit. After going back to the hostel and having a sleep (neither of us got any sleep on our night trains/buses) I met some more people I had met in Riga and proceeded to sample large amounts of Russian beer (nasty stuff) and Vodka. Friday was a complete write off for several reasons. 1. We didn't wake up until 1200 2. We spent 2 hours trying to buy train tickets for Moscow (Cyrillic is really hard to read)!! 3. Our hostel could not be bothered to register our visas so we had to find somewhere else 4. We walked about for 5 hours and found that there was no where else to register our visa so we decided to leave it until we got to Moscow. After all this I was pretty fed up to put it mildly so I went to bed. On Saturday we saw the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, walked to the top of St Isaac's Cathedral, walked around Vasilyevsky and saw St Peter and Pauls Fortress, which was really disappointing! On the Sunday Chris went to see a statue of Lenin whist I slept before catching our train to Moscow at 1800.