St Petersburg in the snow

Looking back over Troitsky Most, originally uploaded by Racmol.

We're back safe and sound after a fabulous holiday in St Petersburg and I've even managed to upload a few photos to flickr. More to come in January - apparently I've reached my upload limit for December.

Jules would like to draw everyone's attention to his sequence of me drinking Georgian vodka, by the way.

I think the best thing about St Petersburg was the snow. There was much more of it than I'd expected and it made everything more spectacular somehow. Of course, it's pretty impressive anyway - 85% of the buildings in the central city are over 150 years old.

It was damn cold, around -6 to -8. The locals say that's about as cold as it ever feels, because once you get down to -12, the humidity drops away and it's easier to bear.

Our first night we went to a nearby huntsman restaurant, Kalinka Malinka. The decorations were wolfskins and bearskins, complete with heads and paws. One bear's head must have been a bit of a mess, because someone had hung a blue tinsel pompom over it! A bit flippant, I thought.

Christmas Day we woke up at dawn (10 am) and almost missed breakfast. Then we spent the day at the Hermitage, which was excellent - great to see brand new paintings by your favourite artists that you've never seen before because...uh...they're in the Hermitage. Also ghoulishly well-preserved people and horses dug up out of peat in the Russian anthropology section.

That night we went to a Georgian bar/restaurant, Kavkas, which was the scene of the Georgian vodka experience. Basically, we had Christmas Stew instead of Christmas Turkey, but it was quite tasty.

Have to go and prepare a guinea fowl for our houseguests now so more later. Since they've been here, the wireless connection has broken down and now the phoneline doesn't work. When they went to bed last night, Jules muttered: Dadster's only been in the house a matter of minutes and look at the damage!