Friday was our main full day in St Petersburg; time-wise, Thursday had been a full day too but by the time we had got up and had lunch, it felt too late to start anything major.
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The train was due into St Petersburg just after 7am (ugh) so our alarm went off at 6am to allow us time to have a bit of breakfast and get sorted before arrival. (We could have just woken up when it arrived and got sorted then but we wanted to be at the hotel before rush hour). Considering we only had about two or maybe three hours sleep at an absolute maximum, we felt reasonably fresh.
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We wanted to get going reasonably early (for us) on Wednesday morning – it was our last morning in Moscow and we wanted to go to see Lenin. The mausoleum closed at 1pm and before then, we had to walk through Red Square and around the Kremlin to the cloakroom near Kutafia Tower, then back again into Red Square to the queue for the mausoleum, preferably joining the queue around noon. Achieving this AND sourcing a breakfast location would be an impossibility for me and SleepyLeach so we elected to breakfast in bed.
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Since we didn’t have any breakfast plans, we didn’t rush out of bed at 8am on Tuesday morning. We leisurely woke up about 10am and took an hour or so to get out of the hotel.

Our plan for the day was visiting Red Square, GUM and the Kremlin. We walked over the bridge into Red Square, stopping to take photos of one of the “seven sisters” on the way (I’m not sure which one – the one to the east when you’re standing on the bridge in the middle of the Moskva river – possibly Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya).
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To connect with the flight to Moscow, we had to get the 0605 flight from Leeds Bradford to Amsterdam. Ugh. I am so grateful we only live ten minutes from the airport. There wasn’t much of a queue at check-in (unlike at the adjacent Jet2 counter) and we got through the security-pantomime checks pretty quickly. We had a bit of breakfast in the cafe, marvelling at the buckets of coffee and many pints of beer that were being consumed by our fellow passengers. At 5am. Ahem.

The flight to Amsterdam went smoothly and we arrived on time. Much to our amazement, we arrived at the gate next to the one we were departing from and said gate didn’t change repeatedly while we were waiting. I almost missed our usual 10km hike across Schipol.
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I’ve wanted to go to Russia for as long as I can remember – and my reading over the last couple of years (particularly about the Siege of Leningrad and the Gulags) has only increased that desire. Last year, when we were planning the holiday that became Budapest, I contemplated Moscow instead (I didn’t know then that the visa requirement would have made such a last-minute trip almost impossible) but John, who was looking for an excuse to get a better camera, said we should wait until we could do the trip photographic justice. So a year on, equipped with the fruits of John’s current consumer obsession, we went on a two city break: Moscow and St Petersburg, with a night on the sleeper train inbetween.

• Monday 29th August
• Tuesday 30th August
• Wednesday 31st August
• Thursday 1st September
• Friday 2nd September
• Saturday 3rd September
• Final thoughts on the holiday (coming soon)

(Full photo gallery to follow)

– written up at the start of September, 2005