Unfortunately Vienna gets the short end of the stick on this trip, welcoming us at the end of our whirl-wind tour of northern Europe. Fairy tale castles and cobblestone walkways have all had their toll on us and both John and I quietly realize how strangely uninterested we are in exploring this city. As we leave this morning to visit the city, we discover that we are both more than anxious to find some warmth on the beaches of Croatia.

Today is a beautiful high summer day. The hot sun doesn’t encourage us as we literally drag ourselves around the city. We are already talking about coming back to Vienna to view its treasures with clear and refreshed eyes. We arrive at the Museum quarter and this furthers our resolve. This is a district that would put some of the great museum cities to shame. Beautiful buildings clustered together with a wealth of viewing potential. Classic architecture holding some of the best works of art in Europe. We wander through the quarter, not inspired enough to actually visit any of the museums today, and pause at an internet café for some coffee and a quick update. We have not found any internet cafés that will allow us to plug our lap top in and so while email has not been an issue, updating the web site certainly has. We have no idea about internet availability in Croatia so our journal may have to wait a week or so to be updated. Our anxious fans of followsummer.com may have to wait.



Top from left: The Rathaus; the Neue Hofburg
Bottom from left: The Burgtheater from the Volksgarten; the Rathaus from the Volksgarten

N 48
E 016

Salzburg via Melk to Vienna: 318 kilometres

We have a leisurely chat with our host, Martin, this morning over breakfast and discover that he is quite an accomplished young man.

We don’t have to be in Vienna before 6 pm so we linger and head out around noon. Our B&B hosts in Vienna, Kristian and Alex, have told us that we should stop and visit the Abbey in Melk, an hour or so outside of Vienna,

The morning is clear and sunny as we head to Vienna. We are both tired of the driving and day here, day there, life we have been leading. I secretly think that we are anticipating being on our vacation-away-from-our-vacation in Croatia in 48 hours, but our drive is buoyant and fun and we arrive in Melk around 3 p.m. and find an incredible baroque fantasy famous for its library, which is mentioned in Umberto Ecco’s “Name of the Rose”. There has been an abbey and library on this site since the 12th century, one of the most important in the Holy Roman Empire. Situated on the Danube, it is a huge building and it dominates the picturesque town of Melk below.


From left: The Abbey of Melk above the town; the main courtyard; the Cathedral


From left: The Altar at Melk; detail of the Library; the Marble Room at Melk

We enter and are immediately directed to the Abbey’s extremely interesting, modern and interactive museum. We make our way through the rest of the abbey – staterooms, library and church – and wander over to into town to do some banking and have a look around before heading back up to the Abbey and having a rest stop in its garden.


The Garden Pavilion at Melk

Vienna beckons and we arrive with great directions about 6:15 without a hitch, finding parking easily. However easy a day it has been, we are both tired. Our hosts are heading out of town for the weekend and it turns out that we will have the flat to ourselves for our time here. John runs to the corner store and buys some wine and we all have a drink together; then we unpack for the night, and head out to their recommended local restaurant for dinner and an early evening. I have risotto with gorgonzola and John has a wonderful dish of breaded and sautéed kohlrabi with a pesto sauce. The meal is surprisingly good for the price and so we wander back to our flat and enjoy the penthouse patio view as the full moon rises over Vienna.

A quiet morning but full of productivity. We reconfirm out B&B in Vienna. After our earlier than anticipated arrival in Salzburg and one other surprise arrival in Amsterdam, we are going to make it a habit of reconfirming our reservations. We also book a quick and cheap flight to London mid-August to see the city and more importantly to see our friend Neil, who we met in Mykonos. We finalize our mini-vacation to the beaches in Croatia, catch up on some email and head out to the city.

It is a gloriously sunny and clear day. We are in shorts and t-shirts but it is just a little too cool out of the sun so we bring jackets as well. Our first stop is the tourist information booth where Martin has directed us to find out about – yes –the Sound of Music tour. It is prohibitively expensive and again, even I can’t bring myself to suffer the kitschiness of it all. We wander across the street to the Schloss Mirabell and gardens and decide to do our own tour of Saint Julie’s movie. You will remember this garden as one of the gardens her Saintlieness sang “Doe, a deer” with those adorable children. Today it is full of tourists and workers, who are setting up an event for the Festival later this evening. The garden is actually quite lovely and has a sweeping view up to the Festung Hohensalzburg.


Schloss Mirabell gardens: can’t you just hear those delightful children singing??

We stop for a patio lunch beside - you guessed it: the house where Mozart lived for seven years - and then continue our exploration of the city. We cross the river, stop into one of the many shops selling Mozart chocolates and John buys some marzipan and I buy some dark chocolate. We take the funicular up to the Festung Hohensalzburg and spend an hour enjoying the almost 360 degree view from high above the town. We look for Hellbrunn, the Von Trapp family schloss (in the movie) and Stift Nonnberg, the famous convent where Maria sought refuge from her life at the beginning of the movie and from those terrible Nazis at the end. No need to remind you of all those dear, memorable songs sung at the Abbey.


The view from the Festung Hohensalzburg

We cannot pick out Hellbrunn but we do see the red domed bell tower of Stift Nonnberg and wander down to the Abbey. It is a beautiful chapel, quiet and completely uninhabited by tourists. I discover later that Maria and the Baron were actually married in this Chapel, not the grand cathedral that, in the movie the Saints Andrews and Plummer were so theatrically wedded in.


From left: Nonnberg from the Castle; the view from the Abbey; Nonnberg

We continue walking down into the town proper in the late afternoon sun and have a rest stop over a quick beer in a small patio on a little square. We walk back over the Mozart pedestrian bridge, head for home, very quick naps and back out for dinner and another glimpse of the almost full moon, rising above the castle.


A well deserved beer!

N 47
E 013

Prague to Salzburg: 399 kilometres

We seem to be following the ghost of Mozart: first in Prague, where he debuted many of his works and now onto Salzburg where he was born. Legend has it that Mozart didn’t like Salzburg that much but we find the storybook town just as Julie Andrews and the cast of the Sound of Music left it: picturesque, clean and surrounded by those famous mountains. And with all the buzz and excitement of the Salzburg Festival, which has just opened.


Our first view of Salzburg from the North

Because we are in the mountains, the weather is crisp but sunny. Our drive has taken much longer than we expected today because of intense traffic and road construction. We telephone our B&B host Martin and low and behold, he is expecting us tomorrow! We wander around the town for an hour, to allow him to scramble for our arrival and we drop our bags off and walk into town for some dinner and a glimpse of the town as the sun is setting.

Martin lives very close to the river and we have a tree canopied walk to and from the town center, only 10 minutes away. We wander around the squares and across the Salzach River, which is quite high, singing the many and various songs from the Sound of Music, trying to pick out the different locales from the movie in the gathering dusk. No one takes any notice of us as we sing. The locals must be quite used to this. The various Sound of Music tours, expeditions and other outings make a lot of money for the town. There is even a Sound of Music dinner theatre that performs year round. They will cater to your corporate function, business meeting or what have you. They add carols for their Christmas show. In the summer, they have a “cocktail show” at 5:15. The menu? “Schnitzel with noodles and crisp apple strudel”. Even I am horrified at this prospect.

There is a lot of music scheduled for the Festival and we consider purchasing tickets for one of the performances. But this will all have to wait until tomorrow when we can get a better look at the town in the daylight. We wander the labyrinth of the old town practically alone, shopkeepers and tired waiters closing up for the night and the odd group of kids hooting it up on a Wednesday night. This seems to be a town of music and, strangely enough, plastic surgeons. For every reference to Mozart or music there is a surgeon’s sign hanging from a Baroque building, advertising their expertise. We traverse the river over the Mozart pedestrian bridge, heading for home and as we round the corner the moon, almost in its full glory, peeks out from behind the clouds just behind the fantastic Festung Hohensalzburg, the castle, high on the hill above town.


Festung Hohensalzburg

A casual day for wandering in the beautiful sunshine! We head back to the Jewish Quarter, fascinated by the history and the buildings. Then into the Old Town, where we go up the Town Hall Tower and are rewarded with fantastic views. We retrace some of our steps from our first day and also our guided walk with Helena, stopping to savour some of the overlooked detail, unseen vistas or architecture we may have missed along the way.

Around Prague


A wedding at the Old Town Hall



Prague as seen from the tower of the Old Town Hall

After naps and dinner, we are back wandering the streets, with our tripod, taking photos of magical Prague after dark.


The Castle and St. Vitus’ Cathedral


The Charles Bridge


The Old Town Square; Cow, all dressed up for the party that is Prague!

Prague is completely and absolutely full of tourists of every stripe – German, Italian, Japanese, English, and American. The entire old city – which is made up of 5 historic precincts, the Old Town, the New Town (about 700 years old, not so new), the Jewish Quarter, then cross the river to the Little Town and Prague Castle – seems to have its mind set on selling something to the tourists. We see little evidence of stores catering to locals, although as we wend our way around these ancient areas, we are surprised that many of the people who sit in the outdoor cafés are speaking Czech.

The number one item on the sales agenda is music – there must be a different concert in a different venue on a different night for every tourist. We can’t get over how many flyers we are handed and posters we see for different concerts, catering to all musical tastes from the greatest hits of the 1500s to concerts of musical theatre. And I will always remember Prague as the city of music because trios and quartets play and sing for coins on the streets and bridges – all of them surprisingly good. We can’t help but become infected with the spirit of this musical city, and as we walk we sing snatches from Don Giovanni, which Mozart premiered in Prague, and which is the #1 offering on the musical menu – from 3 full productions daily, one at the Estates Theatre, one at the Black Light Theatre, and one at the Marionette Theatre, to arias included on the programme of many of the concerts; Prague seems to thrive (at least economically) on this opera. This does not include the incredible number of hour long “hits” concerts at the various churches and chapels of the city.

After a bite of lunch in one of those outdoor cafés, we join a 4 hour walking tour that promises to give us the full story on Prague. We start in Wenceslas Square, which we had explored yesterday. Our guide, Helena, points out the bullet holes in the Museum at the top of the square, which date from the Russian invasion of 1968, which stopped the democratic reforms known as the Prague Spring. The Russians mistook the museum for the Parliament, which is across the street and to the left. A few metres away are the monuments to two young men who both committed suicide by setting themselves on fire to protest the Russian actions. They were 19 and 20.

We head from the New Town, started by Charles IV in 1348, through a narrow passage to the Old Town. By this action, Charles intended to make Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the most modern city in Europe. Helena shows where the walls used to be, and indicates the roof of the 1 gate still standing. Most of what Helena points out here we had stumbled across yesterday, but she does take us by the Estates Theatre, so-called because it was built for the exclusive use of the aristocracy, meaning that we common folk were not able to see Don Giovanni in its original production when it premiered here. The opera scenes of the movie Amadeus were filmed inside the theatre, and the production which plays every day all summer long uses historically appropriate costumes, scenery and staging techniques.


From left: The Estates Theatre; the Atronomical Clock on the Old Town Hall; Church of Our Lady of Týn


The building on the right looked like the building on the left until an accident during restoration revealed a striking Gothic building underneath the Baroque façade


A cow in the Cow Parade, happening all around Prague

Around the corner is the Jewish Quarter. We are realizing that these Towns, originally all legally separate entities are not very big geographically – we wonder how many people actually lived in each town 500 and 600 years ago. The story of the Jews in Czech is not a happy one – restricted from leaving the Quarter, prohibited from carrying out any activities except selling jewels and gold and lending money, enduring the occasional pogrom, but tolerated for much of the time because they provided the only source of capital (necessary to finance the king’s spending) at a time when the Church prohibited Christians from lending money. This changed in 1848, as part of the wave of social unrest that swept through Europe that year, when the Czech Jews were guaranteed their civil rights. By the beginning of WWII, there were about 18,000 Jews in Prague, and the Jewish Quarter had fallen into disrepair after a century in which they were able to live anywhere. By the end of the war, the Jewish population was gone, few of the survivors returned to Prague, and the synagogues, public buildings and cemetery are all museums (and – as are almost all building in Prague – concert venues). There are only about 1,500 Jews living in Prague now.


The Staronová (Old New) Synagogue

We cross the Charles Bridge into the Little Town, where the nobility lived following construction of the bridge, the better to be close to the Castle. Amongst the many palaces is St. Nicholas Church, not to be confused with St. Nicholas Church (another St. Nicholas Church, in the Old Town: one was built by the father, the other by his son, both Baroque – Helena speculates on the dynamics of this particular family).


From left: 2 St. Nicholas Churches


The Little Town, below the Castle

We walk up and up, rising to the Castle which dominates the City. This castle, still actively used – the President’s official residence, numerous ministries and museums, and the Cathedral, is in amazing shape. It is huge – according to one guidebook it is the largest unified castle complex in the world.

We tour the Castle, marvelling at this sight and that – in particular, St. Vitus’ Cathedral is quite fantastic. Helena tells us that this is the 1st building to use the particular style of vaulting in the roof, and that it spread from here to become quite common throughout Europe. This building was actually only completed in 1929; although it was started in 1344, only ½ was completed before the Hussite Wars interrupted construction.


From left: The Castle Entrance; the President’s Official Residence; Building inside the Castle


From left: St. George’s Basilica; the Steeple of St. Vitus’ Cathedral; Castle garden with view over Prague


Views of Prague from the Castle

Most fascinating in a macabre sort of way is the window out of which the good citizens of Prague, at this point converts to Protestantism, pitched 2 Catholic representatives of the Hapsburgs – the Hapsburgs were Catholic, and theirs was the official religion of the empire. This action, known as the 2nd Defenestration of Prague, started the 30 Year War in 1618, one of the most vicious wars in European history, a battle between Protestants and Catholics. And the good citizens of Prague ultimately reconverted to Catholicism, still the main religion in the Czech Republic.


The 2nd Defenestration of Prague happened through the upper middle window of the stone building, starting the 30 Years War

N 50
E 014

Dresden to Prague: 153 kilometres

Happy Birthday to Nimi on July 30!

We say goodbye to Dresden, and look forward to the delights of Prague. A Sunday drive through some very picturesque German country side is scheduled this morning. Part of our route is indicated on our map as a scenic route and it certainly is. We enjoy green rolling hills with fields of sunflowers crossed by many rivers and streams. Small towns, their houses cascading with overstuffed flower boxes of trailing geraniums, greet us as we drive through. Many tourists never get to see this part of Germany. Rather they opt for the Munich/Bavaria tour, traveling the Romantic Road and seeing the conventional Germany of beer gardens, lederhosen and oompah-pah.

We reach the border of the Czech Republic in about an hour and a half and after we are pulled over, passports inspected, we enter a whole different landscape. All of a sudden there are mountains, some with sharp peaks, sheltering small castles on them. Stretching fields of hay and straw and corn lie in front of us.

Many other things reveal themselves to us as we drive through the small towns that dot the road to Prague. Dilapidated buildings, many still windowless and grey, left over from the Communists. Some of these buildings hold intrepid businesses: brothels with young (and not so young) Czech women scantily dressed selling their wares on the highway outside these hamlets and on the quiet main streets inside, many of them beside seemingly-blind local residents. Suddenly Sunday morning has taken on a different feel. Many of the women try to wave us over as we drive by. We wave back and keep on our way into the city.

We head out in the Sunday afternoon sun to explore the city. There is a metro stop just outside our hotel and we are only four or five stops from the old town. We get off at the bottom of Wenceslas Square, the avenue of fast food joints, pick-pockets, hustlers, tourists and some of the most interesting Art Nouveau buildings in Europe. It is a busy place and all our guidebooks warn us to keep our belongings safe as we stroll up the avenue. At the top of the avenue sits the statue of good King Wenceslas IV of Christmas carol fame, and the National Museum, modelled on the Louvre. It is a motivating beacon to reach the crest of the boulevard.


From left: Good King Wenceslas and the National Museum; Looking down Wenceslas Square; Beautiful Art Nouveau Hotels

Prague is an intoxicating city. So much history, architecture and art crammed into such a relatively small area. We know already that this will be one of our favourite cities on this trip. We wander into Staré Město (Old Town) and reach the vast square, home to the old Town Hall and the Bridge Tower. The square has been through many transitions both political and social over its history and plays host to many different types of architecture from Baroque to Romanesque to Rococo, Baroque, Renaissance and finally Gothic. These buildings now are the silent witnesses of the dozens of expensive restaurants and cafés that lure the tired tourists in for coffee or beer – which is cheaper here than anywhere we have been on the trip – it can be had in some of the cafés for about C$1 for ½ litre.


From left: Staré Město; the Týn Church; Approach to the Charles Bridge

We continue down to the river Vlata (the Moldau) and cross the river over the Karluv Most (Charles Bridge) named after Charles the IV. It is now pedestrian only and it is always busy with strollers out for the view. Across the river is Malá Strana (Little Quarter) nestled right under the Praský Hrad (the Prague Castle). The nobility built their homes and businesses here, encouraged by proximity to the seat of power. Now, the palaces are home to government agencies and international embassies. The red roofs of the buildings draw your eyes up to the castle at the summit.


From left: the Charles Bridge; view to the Castle; view from the bridge

We wander back across the bridge and choose a riverside restaurant for a quick beer in the setting sun. Then we cross the river again, find a traditional “beer and Czech food” dinner in Malá Strana before heading for home and sleep.

N 51
E 013

Berlin to Dresden: 193 kilometres

We pack up after our week in Berlin, and start our drive to Dresden. The road we follow goes through the old East Berlin, and while there is a motorway under construction to get us out of the city, it is not finished yet. The road is fairly well-marked, but there are a few corners where we are forced to make a turn without any signs to guide us. Whether we made the right decision or whether all roads lead to Dresden we aren’t sure, but soon enough we are on the right Autobahn – and feeling right at home as we drive along at 150 kilometres/hour, the slowest car on the road.

Dresden is amazing! Virtually completely destroyed at the end of WWII, most of the important buildings in the centrum have been rebuilt. The Frauenkirche, the architectural masterpiece of Dresden, is almost completed – we are surprised to see that it had been left as rubble until well after the reunification of Germany in 1991.


The river Elbe, the Brûlsche Terrasse (the Balcony of Europe), with the Albertinum on the left and the almost completed Frauenkirche on the right

A beautiful city – we walk happily through the streets. There is a street festival happening around the Frauenkirche, and late in the afternoon we join the happy throngs for a cheap beer. After that, we walk slowly back to our B&B, exploring some of the side streets.


From left: the Frauenkirche, original and new; the Hofkirche; the Schloss


From left: the Semperoper; the Zwinger; detail from the Procession of Princes, the 102 metre long porcelain mural along the outer wall of the Royal Stables

We come up to the Dreikönigskirche and find in front of it a beautiful square surrounded by restaurants. We study menus, and choose 1, Gambotti for dinner. The food is fantastic and the prices even better. We fall into conversation with Alex, our waiter and we discover that he is one of the owners. Alex happens to come originally from Buenos Aires, so we compare notes about one of my favourite cities. About 11, there is wonderful display of fireworks – nobody knows why – and we sit on the square and watch. Thomas, the chef and other owner of the restaurant, has joined us. After the fireworks, we elect to continue the conversation, and wander off to the newer area of town, where Thomas and Alex choose a bar and we get a fuller understanding of this beautiful city from a local's viewpoint.

A beautiful, perfect, summer day. We should have done laundry yesterday and gone to Potsdam today, but we do laundry today – once we find a laundromat, which is easier said than done, as the first 2 we find have gone out of business. Fortunately, a call to Alex gives us the information we need, and we spend the afternoon doing our chores.

We hook up with Derek for dinner, our last evening in Berlin. He heads off at about 8:30 to meet up with a friend, so we say our goodbyes. About 30 minutes later, the skies darken, lightning starts to flash, and we move inside off the patio to avoid the rain. Inside there are more people than there is room, and we start chatting with another patron, Kai, who turns out to be visiting from Norway. We compare notes about Norway, and Kai tells us that the average worker in Norway makes what sounds like a huge amount of money to us – the only way they could afford to live there.

The weather today starts a bit overcast, but with sun peeping out from behind the clouds occasionally. We decide to head out to Potsdam, where the Hohenzollerns made their summer homes, and where the Potsdam Conference happened at the end of WWII. We go by S-bahn – we are very impressed with the public transit system in Berlin: the city is vast, much bigger than London or Paris although having less than 50% of their population, but the transit system goes everywhere. (It makes us wonder why we are always told in North America that cities with urban sprawl cannot have good transit.)

By the time we get to Potsdam, the weather has changed – it is pouring. At Potsdam Station we are confronted with the reality that the day of walking in the royal parks that we had anticipated will be miserable. So onto a tour bus we get, despite the fact that the tour is being done in German only. As we drive along, the tour guide keeps handing out paper towels so that everyone can wipe the fog off the bus windows.

We start with the Neues Palais, a baroque structure similar to those we saw in St. Petersburg, built at around the same time. Across the street are the Kommuns, 2 beautiful smaller palaces, that are actually the servant’s quarters and kitchens, positioned here to hide what lies behind them, and now part of Potsdam University.


From left: 2 views of the Neues Palais; nice servants’ quarters

As we drive around the grounds, we realize how large they are. Although the palaces are not as large as those outside St. Petersburg, the grounds are much vaster. And we are glad not to be walking.

Finally we get to Schloss Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s retreat. It is surprisingly small, but with a spectacular garden. We wish it weren’t pouring.


Schloss Sanssouci and its garden

From here we drive through Potsdam to the Neuer Garten, the 2nd area of Hohenzollern homes. We are heading to Schloss Cecilienhof, built by the last Crown Prince of Germany to be his home. We find it amazing that work continued on this home, styled as an English country home, throughout most of WWI, and that the home was actually finished in 1916. Surprising because we doubt that many other homes were built in Germany during the war.

Although his father, Kaiser Wilhelm, never returned to Germany after the war, the Crown Prince and his family lived in this home until the end of WWII, when it became famous for another reason: the Potsdam Conference, the meetings between Churchill and Atlee, Roosevelt, and Stalin, were held here. Today, the conference rooms are a museum, and the rest of the home is a luxury hotel.


Schloss Cecilienhof

The tour over, we are thoroughly soaked. We head home, make hot tea and have a quiet evening.

Today is a shopping day. John has pretty much worn out his shoes, wearing them practically every day for six months. We both had expected to be sporting more summer oriented foot wear - sandals or flip flops - but the weather hasn’t co-operated plan and so we are wearing out our walking shoes. Our plan is have a leisurely shop for shoes.

We take the U-bahn to Wittenbergplatz Station and walk out and are confronted with an enormous directional sign telling us that this was one of the major departure gates for Jews deported from Berlin. Sadly, they were leaving the city for places like Auschwitz or Dachau. The sign lists at least fifteen final destinations and it is the first thing that you see as you exit the station. It is a daily and humbling reminder for everyone who uses this very busy U-bahn station.

We gaze up the promenade and at the first curve in the street, sitting in the midst of all this stark commercialism, lies another example of the effects of war on this city. Here are the stark remains of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church, bombed by the British on November 22, 1943. Its broken west tower is all that remains.


From left: Wittenbergplatz Station; 2 views of Kaiser-Wilhelm Church

We have walked up to the Kurfûrstendamm (Ku’damm for those in the know), which used to be the commercial heart of West Berlin but nowadays is showing its age. However outdated some of its shops are, it is still a place where Starbucks and the Gap have set up their businesses and it is a bustling, busy street. We start our shoe hunt.

We stop at Starbucks not only for an expensive coffee but because they have a hot spot for wireless internet users and we are desperate to update the website and pick up email. Berlin does not seem to have many internet cafés and those that want to bring laptops in to work will find almost none that will host you. We set up our laptop and anticipate an hour’s break over our iced lattes and some email and web time. Alas, this is not to be. The network is not working and no one behind the counter knows how to fix it. Thankfully, a friendly English speaking gentleman overhears all of this, and tells us of an internet shop down the street, close to Wittenburgplatz station.

We strike up a conversation, introduce ourselves and finish our coffee. Alexander Frey is an American from Evanston, Illinois but considers himself a Berliner, having made the city his permanent place of residence for the last fourteen years. An accomplished conductor and musician, Alex has an international career recording, conducting and playing with many of the world’s established symphony orchestras, and having won a German Grammy for one of his recordings. He offers us his mobile number and insists on us calling if we need assistance again.

The shoe shopping is a success with a new pair being purchased at of all places, Timberland, we head back to Wittenburgplatz station to find our internet café and to update. Again, we are without luck as that elusive café is not to be found. We grab a bus and ride back to our flat where we call Alex on his mobile and sheepishly ask for help again. Interestingly enough he is sitting in an internet café right then and why don’t we join him. It is in Kreuzberg, conveniently close to our flat, and over we head. Alex greets us at the door and we step inside and discover one of the cheapest internet cafés around.
We do our posting, some banking, email and research and afterwards, Alex takes us on an impromptu tour of the area, which turns out to be his neighbourhood, showing us beautiful Victoria Park, with its views over the city, and walking us through the rapidly gentrifying area, back in the centre again after having been, when the wall was still up, a forgotten area on the edge.

The sun is setting, and many Berliners are out enjoying what seems to be their first taste of summer. We all have a drink afterward and lots of conversation. Our friend Derek joins us after his work and our night is gladly later than originally planned.

Berlin is a huge city with so much to see that we have decided to stay a few days longer and not rush our visit. It is sunny and gloriously warm again today. We enjoy our morning and decide to focus on a walking tour of the older parts of Berlin, some of which we stumbled across yesterday. We select some bread and fruit for lunch from the Turkish gentleman across the street from our flat and grab the U-bahn and start our tour.

Our tour takes about 2 hours and focuses on Old Berlin (what there is left of it), most of which is in the former East Berlin. The city certainly doesn’t amaze you as you turn every corner but, the Pergamonmuseum, the Altes Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, which are all situated on Museum Island, and the Gendarmenmarkt, which sells itself as the most beautiful square in Berlin, all are wonderfully striking areas to enjoy. And of course the Doms: The Glorious Berliner Dom (which is, despite the +/- 250 rather creepy sarcaphogi of the Hohenzollerns in the crypt, spectacular), the Französicher Dom and the Deutscher Dom all stand out as beautiful tributes to a glorious pre-war city, surviving a post-war communist tear down of much of what remained. Berlin has its own distinctive feeling - not as romantic as St. Petersburg or Istanbul - but nonetheless rare and compelling.


From left: the old and the new: The Berliner Dom and the TV Tower; the museums of Museum Island


The Gendarmenmarkt

We have plans to meet our friend Derek this evening for dinner and we wind our way over to the Hackescher Markt and the neighbourhood of Scheunenviertel, which is close to the old Jewish quarter of the city. Derek gives us a min-tour of the area showing us small memorials and buildings that have been left intact after the war, bullet holes included. We walk another block and Derek points out where a building once stood. It was obviously bombed during the war and the building was not replaced. The row of tenements on either side of this open space are as they were, somewhat modernized but still standing. On the inward facing walls of those remaining buildings are the names of Jewish families, inscribed on big plaques legible from street level, placed where their flats once were. It is a little chilling.

We pass the Neue Synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis on Krystallnacht and now completely rebuilt. It is heavily guarded by Berlin police officers.

We have a good nosh of Thai food on a patio overlooking the square that is abruptly interrupted by a tremendous thunder and lightning storm that quickly overtakes the city. We run to the S-bahn, which cannot contain the torrents of rain, wait it out a bit and take the train to Derek’s car where we ride through the flooded streets to our neighbourhood and head to a bar to continue our interrupted, wet catch-up.

Happy Birthday to both Dylan Baker and his mother Robin Geller!

Our apartment is comfy and cosy; small enough for us to be in each others’ way and big enough for it not to matter. I sleep in, as usual, and John makes his way to the corner to buy some breakfast staples for the next 5 days or so that we are in Berlin. We have coffee and orange juice, some cereal and rye toast and head out in warm, sunny weather to navigate the U-bahn to discover Berlin.

Berlin, with its deeply tainted historical record, is a complex city. It is this history, some very emotional, that immediately confronts the visitor. You must leave all your preconceptions of the city, the country and its people behind you before you take it all in. The entire rebuilding of a metropolis can be experienced here. There is old with new but the new outpaces the old. From a city bombed into rubble by the Allies to one completely divided by a wall, Berlin has many layers and neighbourhoods to experience. It is all at once a vibrant, European capitol with cafés, theatres, banks and museums and also a testament to history, showing its sometimes humbled face as you turn a quiet corner.

Our first stop is the famous Potsdamer Platz and its completely rebuilt landscape. Potsdamer Platz was once one of the busiest squares in Europe and then after WW II, a no-man’s land in the shadow of the Wall. Much of Potsdamer sat in the Wall’s “death strip” but it is now home to Sony and DaimlerChrysler, and their huge entertainment and restaurant complexes. It is a completely modern tall glass tower complex with a tented canopy. The new “Cathedral”.

We have some lunch here and wander down to the Pariser Platz and the home of the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag. We pass the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, an ambitious memorial under construction that will be a moving and emotional commemorative sight when it is finished.


The Sony Center


Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, under construction

We reach the Brandenburger Tor and see the top of the Reichstag ahead. On one side of the gate is the Unter den Linden, Berlin’s most famous and celebrated boulevard and on the other is the 17 Juni Strasse that cuts through the Tiergarten, the main park in Berlin.

We wander, with all the other tourists and decide to buy a city guide to Berlin, our Lonely Planet guide of Europe not covering the city as extensively as we would like.


From Left: The Brandenburger Tor; the Reichstag

This area reveals nothing of its original splendour; sleek modern buildings now line the boulevard. It is a somewhat unsettling viewpoint: so much history and now nothing to show for it. I’m not sure how I feel about a city that holds such a cruel and horrific history now all clean and shiny but I am trying to leave my preconceptions behind. There is unique and creative evidence of atonement in many places. The Jews are touchingly remembered in many places but there is little evidence of the Wall left. Some parts of East Berlin still remain as dreary and grey as they were before the wall came down. Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the attempted assassination of Hitler by one of the resistance groups. There is a major commemorative planned with heads of European governments participating. It is big news here.

We walk over to the Reichstag and around by the river, past the brand new parliament buildings and around to the front. The line-up is long to get into the Norman Foster remodelled glass dome of the Reichstag. We understand that it is a must see but not today. It is 4:30 and we sit on the front lawn for a bit before taking the U-bahn and heading back to the flat for a nap and then out to our Schöneberg neighbourhood and one of the many restaurants it has to offer.

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Sassnitz to Berlin: 333 kilometres

The alarm rings and wakes us both at 6:45 – we quickly shower and pack the car. Despite the promises of the night before that breakfast would be ready by 7:30, there is no sign of it, nor of any life at the bed & breakfast.

At 8:15, we sail – we are taking a ferry across the Baltic, from Trelleborg to Sassnitz, and then will drive the rest of the way to Berlin, saving hours of driving, and paying no more than the cost of the bridge & tunnel tolls and gas.

At 12 we dock. We start our drive, not taking the fastest route, but rather driving through small towns on country roads until we finally hit the Autobahn, about 150 kilometres outside Berlin. It is a high summer day today – the sun is magnificent in the sky, dancing on the wheat fields that we pass, looking almost ready for harvest.


Land Ahoy!

We are driving through the former East Germany – and although reunification is old news, 14 years old, there is a different look, somehow, than the solidly prosperous Germany of Frankfurt am Main and Köln. And on the radio we hear in English (there are British and US military bases, broadcasting radio from home) a discussion of the economic consequences of reunification on Germany, still being felt through a depressed economy and high unemployment.

We find relatively easily the apartment we have rented for our stay in Berlin. It is in Schöneberg, a bit south of the city centre, but right on the U-bahn. After settling in, we head out to Nollendorf Platz, a few blocks up the street, to find a café for dinner. We scope out the selection, choose 1, and order in halting German – with the assistance of the woman sitting at the next table. To our delight, a meal that would have easily been well over $100 in Scandinavia totals less than half that! The $20 green salad (which we could never bring ourselves to order) is replaced with one for $6, the $12 beer with one for $5, the $35 bowl of pasta with one $10. Welcome to Germany!

Monika, as she turns out, teaches French to Germans and German to foreigners in Kassel, a town in central Germany, and is visiting Berlin for a couple of days, having left husband and children at home. We spend an enjoyable hour or so talking to her about the state of Germany and of the world, during which we discover, amongst other things, that Germany (but not Austria or Switzerland) has decided to discontinue the use of the letter ß, and to replace it with two s, so Saßnitz becomes Sassnitz, and straße becomes strasse. Monika expresses some sadness, and also some doubt about the value of the cost – every textbook used in the German school system is being replaced, at huge cost, as a result of this small change.

We started dinner seated outside, but over the course of dinner and our conversation, the weather has changed – huge thunderheads rolled over, followed by lightning and high winds, then the downpour. We retreated inside, and decide to stay for another beer, hoping the rain would stop. The rain has different ideas, and so we run to the U-bahn, ½ block away, and take it to the stop ½ block away from our apartment.

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Oslo to Trelleborg: 598 kilometres

A day of nice, early summer driving. We have views of the Oslo Fjord as we head almost due south, but soon lose our view of the sea. From there until south of Göteborg, we could as easily be hundreds of miles inland as within shouting distance of water.

We planned on stopping around Malmo, or maybe crossing into Denmark, and stopping for the night. We drive to Trelleborg to the ferry dock, to see whether we can get space on a ferry to Germany, and find that there is space late tonight, which would get us to Germany at about 3 in the morning, or 1st thing tomorrow morning. We choose tomorrow.

We find a bed for the night, and then walk through town. The smell tells us that there is a pulp mill nearby, but the focus of the town is on the ferries – there are 2 lines, going to towns in Germany and Poland, carrying passengers, cars and trucks, and railway freight cars. The ferries pull in and out with great regularity, and surprise us with great regularity.

All of the restaurants in town appear to be pizza joints, and all seem, from their names, to be run by Turks, who also ran a lot of the restaurants in Norway. We pick one, and sit outside until the sun goes down, when finally we can no longer deny that it is too cold to sit outside, and we move inside with the rest of the customers.

Another beautiful day – is summer really here? We head to the Oslo Domkirke, the Cathedral that stands at one end of Karl Johans gate, the main street of Oslo. It is a beautiful church! We stand for ages examining the carved scene behind the altar – 3 scenes, 1 above the other, carved in realistic detail and almost lifesize: below is the Last Supper; in the middle is the Crucifixion; and above, the Resurrection.


The Domkirke

We walk along Karl Johans gate, and stop to admire the Stortinget, Norway’s Parliament. Not separated from the street, but part of it, we are surprised by the surprising lack of apparent security.


The Stortinget and its square
From the Stortinget we continue along Karl Johans gate to the Akershus Slott, the royal palace, which bookends, with the Domkirke, this beautiful street. We are able to walk right up to the palace, and through its grounds – again surprised at the lack of apparent security, and surprised that there is no outdoor space for the Royal Family that is shielded from view.


The Akershus Slott

We walk through the gardens behind the palace, into the beautiful residential and embassy area. Then back through side streets into the centre, simply enjoying the day. After lunch, we head back to the Fortress area, where we climb to the top of the ramparts, and with the view over Oslo below us, we lie on the grass and enjoy a perfect summer afternoon.

We start our 1st morning in Oslo by taking the ferry to the suburb of Bygdøy, full of beautiful homes and museums. As befits a maritime nation, 4 of the 5 museums across the water are concerned with ships – including the Fram and the Kon-Tiki. We are heading to the Viking Ship Museum – where 3 of the Viking boats are on display. These boats were all built around 850 AD and discovered in the mid-1800s, and survived through the ages because they had been used in Viking funeral rituals – and were buried in clay, which preserved them. Much of what is known about Viking ships comes from these 3. We look at them in awe – these boats are beautiful, the carving quite beautiful – and cannot imagine sailing in these open ships, with almost no protection from the elements, across the North Atlantic to Greenland, Iceland and Newfoundland.


Viking Ship

After walking around the neighbourhood, enjoying the sunshine, we take the ferry back to town, and walk through the restored waterfront, full of cafés and restaurants and night clubs. Then we move on to the Akerhus Fortress, situated on a hill overlooking the harbour, some of it dating back to the 1300s. Still an active military site, there are a number of museums inside. I visit one, the Resistance Museum, which documents Norway’s fight against the Nazis, who positioned over 400,000 troops all over the country, because they expected the Allies to commence their counterattack in Norway. I learn why so many pubs around Norway are named “Churchill’s” or “Sir Winston’s” or similar. More chillingly, I learn that the building in which the museum is located was used by the Nazis as a prison for captured resistance fighters, and that the exterior wall was a favoured place for executions.


From left: the Akershus Fortress; view of Oslo from the Fortress

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Bergen to Oslo: 521 kilometres

Ok, I get my big, looming, cloud enshrouded just-as-good-as New Zealand fjords on this trip.

We check out of our hotel quite early (for us) and are on the road by 9:30, foregoing the fast route and taking the scenic road from Bergen to Oslo, through some of the most beautiful scenery in Norway. We highly recommend it!

The clouds are hanging low and grey again with a gentle rain falling as we pull out of Bergen. No one had quite prepared us for the diversity of landscape that we would travel through over the next 9 hours. We start through one of the many tunnels we will go through on our drive to the capital and break into a fjord-filled pine and rock-faced landscape, sheer wet cliffs reaching up to the sky. The road is windy and in many places turns into a one lane road heading in which ever direction the first car or bus to arrive is going. We skirt tranquil fjord lakes being cracked by the occasional waterfall, tumbling bridal veil-like from the tops of the mountains. Many hair-pin turns greet us as we seem to be heading up.



The Fjords

The road continues in this way for about 2 hours until we stop in Bruravik to take the ferry across the fjord to continue on our way to Oslo. Shortly after we get off the ferry, the road turns away from the fjord and follows a river up, and up, and then we enter a tunnel – 8 kilometres long – and in it we rise and rise.

When we exit the tunnel, we are into a completely different landscape than the lush wet greens we left below – we are above the tree line, driving through tundra on the Hardangervidda, the largest mountain plateau in Europe, between 1,100 and 1,300 metres above sea level. We drive along, amazed at how quickly the environment has changed, passing the occasional cottage, tent and campervan. The temperature has fallen as dramatically as the scenery has changed. We are now down to 7° with a wind blowing and large patches of snow still visible. We stop for lunch at a café that appears to be the last outpost on the plateau before we reach the North Pole, and dressed as we are for early spring, we are not dressed appropriately. We have soup and tea for lunch, and marvel again at the cost of living in Norway – C$19 each for a bowl of soup!


Hardangervidda

We continue our lonely drive through the permafrost and tundra and we eventually make it back down into the alpine valley and start to run parallel with the famous Oslo to Bergen train route. It is said to be one of the most beautiful train rides in the world. Judging from what we have driven through so far, we would agree. We pass camp grounds full to the brim with camper vans, tents and trailers, all seeming to be enjoying the “summer” holidays. Norwegians, it appears, love to camp.

At this point in the trip it has taken us just under six hours to travel 300 kilometres and we are just looking forward to the last two hours of easy driving on a relatively larger highway when we approach an abrupt detour sign that points us north and out of our way! Our road is closed! We have no choice but to follow the flow and we head back up into the mountains for about an hour and cross over to the alternate road that will take us into Oslo. The view is, at this point, much less interesting – how many pine trees and beautiful vistas can you take in one day?

We coast into Oslo at about 6:30, check in to our hotel and make our way, somewhat wearily, around the downtown of Olso, focusing our attention for tonight anyway on the main street, Karl Johans gate.

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Our overnight is uneventful, our cabin a snug cocoon from the chilly Norwegian Sea air. We have a quiet morning; breakfast is our standard Scandinavian buffet of cereal, porridge, bread, coffee and orange juice – we still haven’t become accustomed to the cheese and cold cuts that seem to be the main event for the Scandinavians. We bundle up and spend an hour walking the ship, taking photos and enjoying the occasional, wayward sun – no rain today. Then we settle into the Panorama Room (they kick everyone out of their cabin at noon), and read till we dock mid-afternoon. We have the occasional promenade on deck, especially when the sun chooses to show its face - and it does for some extended periods of time.



From the ship

We spend the rest of the afternoon exploring Bergen, which is another very appealing city. It is about 270,000 people, but the downtown feels like it belongs to a very sophisticated city, full of beautiful squares with fountains and sculptures – possibly because this is the biggest tourist town in Norway. Bergen was one of the most important cities in the Hanseatic League, because of its beautiful harbour. Today it is this harbour that draws the ships here, and the town is full – we hear more English on the streets than we have heard since we left Toronto 4 weeks ago today.


In Bryggen

We walk over to Bryggen, the oldest part of town, lining one side of the harbour. Despite its appearance – we wonder how the walls stay up, they are so badly tilted – it is a very posh little area: we discover that behind the façade of falling-down ness, are legal and accounting firms. Then we find a street being rehabilitated, and realize that these buildings have been very carefully renovated, to preserve the topsy-turvy exterior in front of new, fully-modernized interiors.

Hurtigruten is the coastal ferry steamer that plies the small ports up and down Norway’s Atlantic coast. Running for over 100 years, the ferries are now a big tourist business – in addition to freight and mail, they carry passengers and cars. The return trip from Bergen to the Russian border on the Barents Sea takes 12 days. There are now 11 ships making the journey, so that all summer long there is a departure at the same time every day. We are joining on day 11, and will go south to Bergen, a journey of 29 hours.

The weather is less than we would have wished – cold, with intermittent showers. Not a day for sitting on the deck, but some of the hardier voyagers do, until driven inside by a heavy rainstorm.

The fjords, as we head out of Trøndheim, are lined with gently rising slopes – the voice over the intercom system tells us that we will pass some of the best agricultural land in Norway on our journey south. We remark that it cannot be easy being a farmer on this land. We pass numerous small islands with 1 house and some outbuildings on them – we assume the people who live in these homes must be fishermen, although we see neither boats nor evidence of boat-mooring facilities; but they cannot be farmers, because these islands are rocky outcroppings.


Heading out

Our fellow passengers seem to be mostly Scandinavian with a smattering of Germans and French to keep things interesting. It is a laid-back crowd. Lots of retirees with many books to keep them occupied on the 12 day journey up and back. We seem to be in the minority as far as age group but we share this with a couple of families with small children. People seem to spend their days either reading and watching the scenery go by from the panorama room on top of the ship or wrapped in blankets on the occasional sunny side of the ship. The optimal word here is relaxed.

We settle quickly into this universally adopted mindset and wander the ship, snapping photos of the grey-blue fjords with tremendous billowing clouds caught on their high, rocky points. The ship is quite comfortable and we easily find our way around. The vistas remain the same, rolling monochromatic fjords on a cold, black sea. I am a bit disappointed with the scope and size of the fjords – they do not compare with those we have seen in New Zealand but being here is what this experience is about.

We stop in the occasional town, multicoloured houses set on high, steep, wind-exposed cliffs. What Norwegians do in February is beyond us. All the while we have a strange feeling of familiarity about these vistas. We could be visiting the outposts of Newfoundland with their rocky shores and bright fishing shacks.

We settle quickly into this universally adopted mindset and wander the ship, snapping photos of the grey-blue fjords with tremendous billowing clouds caught on their high, rocky points. The ship is quite comfortable and we easily find our way around. The vistas remain the same, rolling monochromatic fjords on a cold, black sea. I am a bit disappointed with the scope and size of the fjords – they do not compare with those we have seen in New Zealand but being here is what this experience is about.

We stop in the occasional town, multicoloured houses set on high, steep, wind-exposed cliffs. What Norwegians do in February is beyond us. All the while we have a strange feeling of familiarity about these vistas. We could be visiting the outposts of Newfoundland with their rocky shores and bright fishing shacks.



Along the fiords; and finally sunset just after midnight

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Dorotea to Trøndheim: 438 kilometres

The road gently rises until we are in the mountains, and driving through ski areas – including Ånn, the site of the 2007 world downhill skiing championships. The border between Sweden and Norway is barely marked. More obvious is one immediate change – in Norway, the barns and other farm buildings (but not the farmhouses) have grass roofs.

We arrive in Trøndheim and find a hotel for the night (with a bonus – a wireless network, and have good internet for the first time in over 2 weeks).

We head out for a walk to explore town, and to find a place for dinner. Trøndheim is a pretty town, a former capital of Norway during the Middle Ages, the home of St. Olav, the king who brought Christianity to Norway. It’s waterfront is dotted with cafés and bars overlooking the wharfs and waterways.

We have dinner in one of the few restaurants that is open on a Sunday, and discover that Norway is more expensive than Sweden was. Over dinner we talk about how Scandinavia was a hot travel destination 25 years ago, but how almost all of the tourists we have seen as we have travelled around have been Scandinavian or Dutch.

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Kemi to Dorotea: 631 kilometres

Happy Birthday (July 12) to Anne-Marie Vanier!

The weather is at least with us today as we spend another big day of driving. The sun is out and is a steady beacon as we head south and west. The landscape as we drive south on the Swedish side of the Gulf of Bothnia is just as it was in Finland – flat, green, with the occasional glimpse of the Gulf. The only difference is that we pass through many more villages than we did yesterday in Finland.

We stop for lunch in Skelleftea, one of these little villages, and Olander, the owner of the restaurant we stop in, is clearly a fellow traveler – he makes us stick a pin into the map on the wall to show where we are from – it is the 3rd pin (it is only the 2nd day he has asked his customers to identify where they are from). At a quiet moment, he comes to chat and asks where we are going. We tell him, and he expresses dismay that we are bypassing Trondheim in Norway. He shows us the best way to get there, cutting away from the coast about 100 kilometres further south, and getting some nice vistas in Sweden to boot. We had talked about going to Trondheim, and his seal of approval seals the decision – we are heading that way!

We turn west at Umea, and immediately start rising into gentle mountains, like the Laurentians of Québec. The drive becomes much nicer – beautiful rivers tumbling over rapids, lakes with mountain backdrops. And almost no people – few towns, very few cars on the road. A sign tells us that we are in Lappland - we didn't realize that it came this far south in Sweden - it seemed farther north in Finland. Almost to prove that it is, though, we start seeing reindeer grazing along the edge of the road, sometimes walking on the road, causing us a bit of anxiety when one steps out right in front of us, but they appear completely relaxed around cars.

We stop for the evening thinking it is about 7:30 p.m. – and we have been on the road since about 10:30 this morning. It is actually only 6:30, we forgot about the time change at the Finnish border, but I am tired of driving. The town we stop in looked promising on the map, but turns out to have little in the way of accommodation – 1 hotel (where they tell us that it will be very, very noisy until the bar closes at 2 tomorrow morning, which sounded OK until they told us the price, which was almost as much as a 5 star hotel in Canada) and the campground, where we get a small “bungalow” for 50% more than we paid for the 3 star hotel last night in Kemi. This confirms our impression that Sweden is the most expensive of the 10 European countries we have visited so far this year.

Dinner is pizza and beer in one of the 2 pizza joints – there doesn’t appear to be any alternative. We go back to the cabin and watch TV – the mosquitoes, millions and millions of them, aren’t intimidated by the mosquito repellent we have applied!

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Helsinki to Kemi: 713 kilometres

Logistics and ferry schedules have forced us to do the long drive north through Finland, over the Gulf of Bothnia, down through Sweden and back to Denmark and Germany. We have allowed ourselves three to four days to accomplish this and even that is being optimistic, driving eight hours or so a day. We head north from Helsinki in the by-now standard grey, flat-bottomed and low hanging clouds with the occasional burst of bright sunshine teamed with torrents of hard rain. Yesterday’s International Herald Tribune, the 1st English language paper we’ve seen since Amsterdam informs us that this start to summer has been the coldest on record in the Nordic countries since 1928.

We drive through the Lake District and indeed it is – every kilometre or so we traverse clear lakes with the occasional Finnish cottage on them. Occasionally we see a brave child swimming or jumping off a dock, a warm towel or fleece not too far away. Much of the landscape is like a beautiful Finnish post card and we pass camper van after camper van on vacation. We continue past stretches of pine and birch forest and for much of the drive the beautiful monotony of the landscape doesn’t alter much. The dazzling purple, pink and white wild lupines are in their blooming glory, poking out of the ditches and culverts along the road. Sometimes all you can see is washes of purple, indicating the side of the road. As we head further north, the lilacs are just coming into their brilliance.

I have never been this far north before and our destination for the evening is Kemi, a small town right on the Finnish/Swedish border, at the very top of the Gulf of Bothnia, and about 100 kilometres south of the Artic Circle. The farthest north any Georges have been, (to my knowledge) is when our father Eddie worked a stint in Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island for the Asbestos Company in the early 1970s. He would always send us back stories of the midnight sun and indeed it doesn’t get dark here at all. We are roughly parallel with the most northern tip of Iceland or the southern edge of Great Bear Lake.

We arrive about 8 pm in Kemi and settle into our hotel. It seems that there is a wedding here this weekend as groups of guests are checking in and hugging and laughing with each other in that awkward yet familiar way that family and friends have when they see each other once every couple of years, either at a wedding or a funeral. The Finnish pastime of public drunkenness is evident as we watch tremendously drunken people negotiate the avenue outside our hotel. Well, it is Friday night after all. There seems to be lots of green space and grass for them to tumble upon and have a short nap. John and I grab a bottle of duty free red wine and decide to join them, not on the grass but in the confines of our hotel room (although they all look like they’ve had way more than ½ bottle of wine each).

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The residual hangover from the night before gives us a natural impulse to start our morning late today. We plan to take the hour and a half ferry ride to the medieval town of Tallinn in Estonia this afternoon but we don’t depart until 12:30. Neither one of us is in the best of moods today as we stayed out far too late last night and then had a big fight when we finally got home. Breakfast was silent.

The ferry ride to Tallinn is extremely uneventful. The Jet Cat is designed for complete non-interaction with your fellow traveller and ultimately for those day trippers looking to purchase as much cheap duty-free beer or alcohol as they are legally able to bring back with them or that they can carry or have their friends carry for them. We arrive in Estonia and seek out a square for a late lunch and some humble pie.

Tallinn was a virtually forgotten outpost of the Russian empire until the 1980 Olympics when the sailing venues were located near the city. Moscow decided that they would send a little paint and restoration to the city and discovered a medieval jewel on the Baltic. It is now a medieval city that draws tens of thousands to its gates every year. Unfortunately, it has a bit of a Disney feel to it. The main town square has been transformed into a medieval fair complete with period-costumed locals selling their “merry wares” and medieval pipe and tambour being played for good measure.

John: This is a surprise (and a bit of a disappointment) to me – I was here 4 years ago with my mother, and the Disneyfication had not begun – the city was a wonderful discovery back then, without any Boss or Puma stores, and no locals dressed in 13th century costumes. Mom and I loved Tallinn then, and would have stayed longer. Today, I am happy with doing it as a daytrip.




We walk and talk, taking in the sites and views. We soak up the early evening sun back on the square over a beer before we head back to the port and the ride home. Many of the returning faces are familiar to us. Day trippers to Tallinn are very big business for both the ferries and the city. We wander back through the main esplanade in Helsinki, stop off at our internet café to try to check in on email, and miss two trolleys home before we are in our beds in the broad daylight of summer in the north, ready for sleep.

Kouvola to Helsinki: 137 kilometres

The drive from Kouvola to Helsinki is an easy one – the only stop we make is to take photos of one of the brilliant yellow mustard fields.



We get back to our hotel, checked in, and spend the afternoon doing chores – I do laundry, Greg works on the journal and heads to an internet café to post. The posting can be done, but for some reason, our email will not work. We have not been able to send or receive email since we were in Stockholm, 1 ½ weeks ago. I join Greg at the internet café, and with the manager we try to figure out the problem, without success.

We head to a nearby bar – there is ½ hour left in happy hour, an important fact in a country where a pint of beer costs over $10 at normal prices. We start talking to a group of guys, and somehow it is now 9 p.m. and we are in a cab headed to another bar, where we join up with a group already there. The night wears on – people keep telling us that we can’t afford the beer and buying us rounds, refusing to let us return the favour. The only thing that saves us is the realization at about 11 p.m. that if we don’t catch the last streetcar, in about 20 minutes, we are in for either a long walk home to our hotel in the suburbs, or an expensive taxi ride. We say our goodbyes, start walking then run and make it onto the streetcar with no time to spare.

It is our last day in St. Petersburg, and it is beautiful. Our train is not until 4:30 and we have officially finished with our guide Nico so we pack and organize ourselves, check out of the hotel and grab the number 22 bus to St. Isaac’s Cathedral for a day of last minute sight seeing. On our first visit to St. Isaacs we didn’t have the opportunity to spend any real time inside the church-turned-museum, so today we head back for a second look. It is known as one of the most beautiful churches in Europe and it truly is. Ornate gilded angels support the huge dome, beautiful Russian malachite columns flank the altar and ornate chandeliers cast a gentle glow that augments the natural day light that illuminates the enormous space. Unlike the wet day yesterday, the sun streams through the huge window in the dome, a hundred meters above our heads, adding more reflected light to the space and the beautiful mosaics icons on display.



Inside St. Isaac's Cathedral

We wander the area a bit and plan to be at the Yusupov Palace for its opening at 12 pm. The Yusupov, like many of the palaces of St. Petersburg, is an intimate family home and the Yusupov family was rewarded with this splendid palace for their years of loyalty as advisors to the Tsars. It is also known, more sensationally, as the palace where Rasputin was murdered. We choose the guided audio tour and pass through many beautiful but liveable rooms including living, dining, music and ball rooms, and libraries. The crowning stop on the tour is a beautiful 150 seat theatre built for the family for informal music presentations and other entertainments. It is still used today for chamber music concerts.


Inside the Yusupov Palace


The theatre

We have lunch close to the palace and walk the canals back to our hotel, a quick 15 minute walk. Our taxi is waiting for us and we head across town, in mid-afternoon Russian traffic, to our waiting train.

St. Petersburg has been a beautiful and wonderful, eye-opening experience for me. It is a constant feast for the eyes, much like Florence or Venice is, but with a unique, golden sumptuousness to it. I quickly got over my pre-conceived fears of what Russia was about – a threatening, dark place of unemployment and voice-less hordes, put down by their government. While we did see some questionable sorts, they where no more or no less then we have encountered in Sydney, Bangkok, New Delhi or Toronto. The light was constant and ever changing while we were here and that is largely due to “White Nights” and the never ending glowing light of the night/day. It is part of what makes St. Petersburg so magical.

After a day of beautiful weather, we pay the price today: it pours almost the entire day. Having visited (or not) the palaces on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, today we turn our attention to sights not yet seen in the city itself. Our starting point is the Fortress of Peter and Paul, strategically set on island with a commanding position over the Neva. Inside the fortress is the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, whose spire is visible from all over St. Petersburg, and which serves as the necropolis for the Russian imperial family.

We have gotten used to transiting in the city – first a bus, then a metro, then another bus or a walk. When we leave the hotel, it seems the rain has stopped, for the sun is peeking out. The rain holds off until we have gone down into the metro, but as we exit, it is simply pouring.

Greg: The central line of the metro system of St. Petersburg is truly beautiful and well worth a visit if not a ride. Built in the mid-1950s, most stations are tunnelled deep under the city and are a glorious tribute to the former Soviet Union. I time our steep descent on the escalator today at over two minutes, straight down and moving fast. Each station is themed and trimmed out in marble with exquisite light fixtures and other finishes. There is no graffiti evident and you truly feel like you are stepping back in time to a different era and way of thinking, to the Soviet Union of our childhood: cold, threatening and dominant, powerful and icon driven. But still so beautiful.

We walk from the metro to the fortress, glad of our umbrellas, but wishing we had worn our rain jackets as well. Oh well – there are sights to be seen!

First we visit the Cathedral – almost the 1st thing built in the fortress, its steeple so high to show the Swedes they had lost this territory for good. Much tinier than anticipated, given its prominence on the skyline, we enter. Truly an Orthodox church, with its wall of icons shielding the inner sanctum from our view, and of course no pews (people stand and prostrate themselves during Russian Orthodox services, but do not sit), what immediately grabs your attention are the simple marble tombs, may 1 metre high by 1.5 metres wide by 2 metres long, which house the remains of every tsar and tsarina from Peter the Great on. Marked only by a simple cross, they are unexpectedly sober, given the opulence of everything else in St. Petersburg.


From left: the spire and dome of the Cathedral of Peter and Paul; the dome from inside the Cathedral; inside the Cathedral – at the bottom left is the marble grave of one of the tsars

When we look at the tomb of Paul I, whose home Pavlovsk we visited yesterday, Nico tells us that he wasn’t originally allowed to be buried here, because he was murdered so soon after ascending the throne that he was never crowned, and burial in the Cathedral of Peter and Paul was deemed inappropriate – until somebody changed their mind, and he was moved from the Nevsky Monastery, where the immediate families of the tsars are buried.

There is a huge crowd gathered in one corner of the room, and we move over to see what they are gawking at – which turns out to be, in a room at the back of the cathedral, the burial place of Nicholas II and Alexandra, together with their children. Although their bones were discovered in 1991, it was only through DNA testing conducted in 1998 that the remains were conclusively identified as theirs, and that they were buried here (and in this way the children are the exception to the rule that only tsars and tsarinas are buried in the Cathedral).

From the Cathedral we visit the prison – where those charged or convicted of treason were held and executed. Not a place that we would want to spend much time!

From here we walk the ramparts of the walls of the fortress, and despite the driving rain, the view over the Neva River to the Hermitage is spectacular.


The Winter Palace, with the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Spire of the Admiralty, from the ramparts at the Fortress of Peter and Paul

Because of the rain we change our plans – which had been to visit the Aurora, the ship that fired the shot that started the October Revolution – and head instead for the Alexander Nevskiy Monastery. Nevskiy is honoured as a hero in Russia – in the 12th century he fought the Swedes for control of the Neva delta, and won, keeping the Swedes away for over 400 years. The Neva and the Nevskiy Prospekt are both named in his honour. The Monastery is one of the most important in the Russian Orthodox Church, and was even allowed by the Soviets to continue as a monastery despite 70+ years of official atheism.


The Alexander Nevskiy Monastery

From the Nevskiy Monastery, we go to the Trinity Cathedral, yet another beautiful church, white Georgian façade with Doric columns, almost like the Royal Crescent in Bath or the Nash Terraces in London, with 4 domes painted royal blue. Allowed to decay by the Soviets, the church is undergoing a major reconstruction at the moment. This is a church that is far different from the more normal baroque of St. Petersburg. Interestingly, one of the things that is being rebuilt is a monument that sat in front of the church for many years, manufactured from Turkish guns and cannons captured during one of the Russian-Turkish wars. This monument was melted down 75 or 80 years ago, as were the lamp standards that were made of 3 cannons welded together, but is being refabricated, which explains the cannons lying on the grass outside the church.

We take the Metro back to the Nevskiy Prospekt – we still haven’t walked it, and walk it we must. We come out at the half-way point, the Moscow Station, and walk toward the Palace Square. Busy despite the rain, it is an amazing promenade, hard to believe that it was laid out almost 300 years ago.


Along the Nevskiy Prospekt: From left: the statue of Catherine II (the Great); the Alexander Theatre; the Kazan Cathedral

As we walk along, the rain finally stops. We walk further, stopping in a few stores, buying nothing. We find a restaurant for dinner, and then it is time to say goodbye to Nico, for we leave St. Petersburg tomorrow. I am very sad to say goodbye – Nico has been a wonderful guide, getting us around safely, explaining nuances that are not apparent to us, and he has become our friend. Thank you, Nico! We have enjoyed spending time with you!

Happy 4th of July to all our American friends

Sunday in Russia is like a romantic Seurat painting: everyone is out in the parks and by the canals and the rivers, enjoying the warm sunny weather on their one day liberated from work. Families eating ice cream, and couples, the men smartly dressed, the women with their lipstick just so, walking or sitting on park benches holding hands, some drinking a beer, others possibly some cold vodka. Several are picnicking, some are playing volleyball, all seem to be enjoying the fact that summer has arrived, for today at least.

We too are having a Sunday in the park and our train is crowded with day-trippers heading from St. Petersburg to the same spot we are. We are all taking the 40 minute train ride south to Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo, the palaces of Paul I and Catherine the Great and the wonderful parks and woodlands that surround them. The citizens of St. Petersburg seem to take great advantage of their many public parks and the vast expanses of palace garden and green space available to them both in and outside of the city. Today seems to be no exception.

We arrive in the town of Pavlovsk and enter the palace grounds through the back entrance. We walk through beautiful old growth forests, along long-abandoned horse and carriage roads heading toward the palace, passing formal ponds and beautiful, slightly overgrown vistas. It isn’t hard to picture the sylvan landscapes painted by artists over two hundred and twenty five years ago.


From Left: The approach to the Pavlosk; Paul himself; the main courtyard of Pavlosk

The Pavlovsk, the reconstructed palace of Paul I, the first son of Catherine the Great and his bride Maria, is more humble and ultimately less touristy than Peterhof, but we still suffer the sharp elbows of some Russian tourists vying for viewing time in this more intimate palace. We walk through, and are reminded of the destruction that the Germans left behind as they retreated after their failed siege of Leningrad during WWII through the many photographs displayed throughout. (In fact, all of the palaces on the outskirts of St. Petersburg that we see were in territory occupied by the Germans, and were left in similar shape, and Peterhof, Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo have been to a large extent, and continue to be, completely restored to their original splendour.) The palace has a grand but still intimate feel; like visiting your very rich relatives in their home.



Inside the Pavlovsk

We have brought our lunch with us and grab a shady bench and are amused at the Russian tourists enthralled with a seemingly never-before-seen squirrel doing his squirrel thing. We watch as the locals squeal and chase the squirrel, imagining him some wild exotic animal, trying to get him to pose for pictures. We cringe as the squirrel runs all over them, stopping to eat what they offer.

We jump on one of the local mini-buses and it drops us at the lower gates of the Tsarskoe Selo: the Catherine Palace. Created by the Empress Elizabeth and significantly expanded by Catherine the Great, it is one of the largest and grandest of them all.


The approach to the Catherine Palace

We spend some time walking around the extensive grounds viewing the many buildings that were built and designed for sometimes a single task: breakfast for the royals in the morning house or tea in the afternoon across the Grand Pond in a smaller pavilion. The day is sunny and actually quite hot and we are enjoying being out in t-shirts again.



The grounds of Tsarskoe Selo

We continue our promenade up to the main “house” and approach by the Cameron Gallery and immediately spot a line up for entrance into the palace. We are faced with the same dilemma we faced at Peterhof - long lines and no access to the main house. Nico has an idea about trying to get us into the palace as part of a tour group but we will have to make our way all the way around the building and negotiate with a tour operator. Needless to say this proves to be unsuccessful and as we wind our way back to the main line up, I opt to stand in line while John and Nico continue to explore the beautiful grounds. Individuals are only allowed to purchase entrance tickets to the Catherine Palace between 4 and 6 pm and the palace closes at 7 pm. There is a large crowd waiting to get into the palace and after an hour and a half of standing in the sun and moving perhaps 5 feet towards the main entrance, at 5:30 we decide to leave the line and head for home.



The view from outside the palace

While we are disappointed that we have not been able to see the glorious interiors of the Catherine Palace, we are happy to have had a wonderfully warm and sunny day to enjoy the parks and the Russian people.


We bid farewell to the Catherine Palace

We are off to Peterhof today. The 2nd summer palace of Peter the Great, it was built on the site of a former Swedish fortress (as were most of the great country palaces of the tsars) to show that the Swedes, who had controlled the Neva delta for hundreds of years, and who had thus denied Russia a port on the Baltic, had been truly vanquished from this part of the world.

We take a hydrofoil from the Palace Embankment across the Gulf of Finland to Peterhof – a 30 minute journey which takes you to the sea entrance, the entrance used by the tsars. We have a bit of time to get to know Nico a bit better – currently studying web construction and design, he was educated in Soviet military academies, and served in the army during the period in which the USSR dissolved. We pry, we hope not too much, into life in the military, and the experience of serving while the country you are serving is disintegrating. After leaving the military, he returned from Belarus to St. Petersburg and was a policeman before deciding to return to school.

The 3 palaces at Peterhof (the Great Palace, the Marli Palace and the Mon Plaisir Palace, while beautiful, are not the main event; the fountains are. Entering from the sea as we do, they are almost the first thing we see – at the top of the canal that leads up from the Finnish Gulf, situated just below the Great Palace.


Approaching Peterhof from the Gulf of Finland


The Golden Cascade

We ooh and ah over the Golden Cascade, then turn our attention to the Great Palace; unfortunately, everyone else has decided to do the same, and as we look at the long line of people patiently queuing, we decide to focus on the grounds and fountains instead. We walk towards the Marly Palace and the Hermitage. The Hermitage at Peterhof was the first one built by the Russian czars, long predating the more famous Hermitage attached to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. It was used as a dining room, surrounded by a moat to ensure solitude, and employed a clever mechanical device, whereby the table was set and the food served in the basement, and the table was then raised to the main level, so that the servants did not intrude on the tsar and his guests.


From left: The Hermitage at Peterhof; the Marly Palace

We walk past many fountains as we wonder the grounds, marvelling at the fact that they all date to the first half of the 1700s, and all operate solely on gravity. Some of the fountains are quite whimsical – these are mainly designed to help you cool down on a hot day, by gushing out of a bench that you may have unsuspectingly sat on, or by coming out of the ground when you step on certain rocks by the side of a pond


Fountains at Peterhof

We are all dragging by this point, and we leave the palace complex by the main entrance, on its land side. We walk the short distance to Petrodvorets, the town outside the palace gates.


The main entry to Peterhof

In Petrodvorets, we go to the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, built in a very different style that that of baroque St. Petersburg. Although the second Cathedral of Peter and Paul built by Peter the Great (the first still stands inside the Fortress of Peter and Paul, in St. Petersburg), this is clearly not a cathedral built to be used by the imperial family – despite the gold of its icons, it is on the inside a very simple church.


The Cathedral of Peter and Paul in Petrodvorets

We grab a minibus back to the last stop on one of the metro lines in St. Petersburg, take the metro into the centre, then grab a bus to the hotel, where we collapse, our feet and our bodies tired. Dinner tonight is at a little café across the street from the Mariinsky Theatre, then it is early to bed.

Happy Birthday to Janet Sinclair on July 4!

Today we are doing the Hermitage. We allow ourselves to sleep in a bit, and head out late in the morning. We are on our own for today – Nico is with other guests, 2 Canadians from Vancouver, as it turns out. So we get instructions from the hotel about how to get to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and we will walk from there.

The Hermitage Museum occupies 5 buildings in its main site (and 3 satellites here in St. Petersburg, as well as in a few major cities around the world). The main building is actually the Winter Palace, the St. Petersburg home of the tsars until the Revolution, which has since been part of the Museum. The other 4 buildings are the Small Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Hermitage Theatre. The first hermitage at the Winter Palace was established by Catherine the Great, an avid collector of art, as a place for her to inspect her art: she built the Small Hermitage as the place to do this, and over the years, the Old and New Hermitages were added by other tsars. But the collection was so vast (including art owned by major families, such as the Yusupov’s, that was “donated” to the Hermitage after the Revolution) that the Winter Palace was also required to display it.


The Winter Palace, Palace Square and the Alexander Column

We make our way into the Museum and shortly find ourselves very frustrated – none of the signs are in English. 500 rubles later (C$25), we own a wonderful guidebook to the Museum, and begin our exploration in earnest. We actually start in the farthest reaches, the Impressionist Galleries on the 2nd floor of the Winter Palace. We go through room after room – amazing! There are 3 rooms of Picasso alone, well over 100 canvasses, all predating the revolution. They are displayed more or less chronologically, and it is an amazing display of the development of his technique over time. From the Picasso, we walk into rooms of Matisse, where Rodin sculptures punctuate the canvasses. One of the things that I love about the Hermitage is that its collections are so vast that they do have numerous works by one artist – and they display all the works of that artist in contiguous display. It is so rare to see this depth in a collection, and it is such a wonderful way of learning about the artist’s technique.

We head to the State Rooms, overwhelming in their ostentation. We go through room after gilded room. It is incomprehensible the amount of wealth on display in these rooms – and that doesn’t count the art on the walls.

From the State Rooms we head to the New Hermitage, to the Dutch collection – almost as big as the collection at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (which was closed for renovation when we were in Amsterdam), including rooms of Rembrandt. We never make it to the Rembrandt – we spend hours exploring, and are so overwhelmed that we agree to begin working our way out before we find the Rembrandts (although I know, from my previous visit, that there are rooms of Rembrandts somewhere in the building). The shortest exit route takes us to the Old Hermitage, then through the Small Hermitage, and back into the Winter Palace, with new things to see all along the way, even in the parts we’ve already been to.




Around the Hermitage Museum

We head back to our hotel for a short break before we head to the opera tonight. On the way, we discover one of the strange little facts of life in St. Petersburg – trolleys and buses with the same numbers ply the same routes, but go to different places in the end. The first number 22 that comes along is a trolley, and we jump on, not knowing this. We talk excitedly about the Hermitage and what we have seen, and all of a sudden there is a woman telling us that we must get off the bus. We are at the end of the line, and we have no idea where we are. All we know is that we haven’t gone by the stop where we got on bus 22 this morning. It takes us a few minutes to find someone who speaks enough English that they can point to where we are on the English-language map we have – we are a 10 minute walk from our hotel. Off we go, and we indulge in a Russian pastime as we go – we buy 2 bottles of beer, and drink as we walk, feeling like naughty schoolboys, although almost everyone we encounter on the walk is doing the same thing. This strange mistake allows us to discover a forgotten area of St. Petersburg – New Holland – an island that was a timberyard, built in the 1760’s but that has been abandoned for years, and a number of abandoned palaces.


From left: New Holland; abandoned palace

After short naps (we decide to forego dinner – the curtain is at 7:00 p.m.), we head out to the Mariinsky Theatre, a short walk from our hotel. This theatre, built in the 1860s and named after the Tsar’s wife, is one of the most famous ballet and opera venues in the world. Renamed the Kirov after the Revolution, it has gone back to its former name. Although this theatre is only 140 years old, there has been a theatre here for much longer – the signs on the theatre tell us that this season is the 221st.

We make it to our seats just in time to see that the theatre is surprisingly small before the lights go down – which means that although we are in the 5th (and highest) ring, we are actually quite close to the stage. Tonight’s opera is Eugene (or Yevgeny) Onegin, which neither of us have seen before. We watch, enraptured! Tchaikovsky’s music is beautiful, and this opera is so unlike most grand opera – it is about real people and the mistakes they make.

The signing is superb, the soprano playing Tatiana a joy to listen to – which, given her long solo in Act 1, is a good thing! At the 1st intermission, we read our programs and find that this version of the opera, co-produced with Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, is a highly unusual Onegin – seasons have been changed, Onegin is not superior but instead has been wounded in love, and perhaps most importantly, Prince Gremin is not old but is young and handsome. The time passes too quickly, and the opera is over. The audience bravos and bravos the cast – not only Tatiana but also Onegin, Gremin and Lensky. The ovations go on for at least 10 minutes, and many bouquets are presented to the artists.

Nico is waiting outside with his friend Elias, an Algerian studying in St. Petersburg to become a veterinarian, and the 4 of us head off for a drink. We walk along canals, and end up in Hay Square, which has been completely renovated in honour of St. Petersburg’s 300th birthday last year. We sit in a café and have a beer, then Elias heads off while Nico, Greg and I have a couple more beers. At about 2:00 a.m., we decide that we’re ready for bed, although the sky is still quite light. Nico tells us that although the sun isn’t visible, this is about as dark as it will get, and the sun will start to rise within the hour.

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Happy Canada Day to everyone back home!

It is a relatively calm and stress free morning as we head to St. Petersburg. The weather still seemingly against us – it is cool, wet and a north wind is blowing as we head to the station for our train ride into Russia. Kouvola is as I imagined a Finnish outpost on the Russian border to be – bleak and barren, 1950s dull, with a hint of pulp and paper mill in the air. Someone in Helsinki had asked us why we were going to Kouvola – I understand why.


At the train station in Kouvola

The train is about 15 minutes late but I don’t take that as an omen of things to come. Before when I travelled, these little indicators – late trains, misread maps, or lost tickets – meant that something terrible was about to happen. Now I take this all in stride. The train is not full but we are surrounded by Finns and Russians and three Japanese gentlemen who look like they are travelling to St. Petersburg for business. We get settled without incident and John pulls out a New Yorker he has been saving and I grab a crossword that I have been saving. The green pine and birch forests drift by the train windows as we relax into our seats.


Half and hour into our journey the very jolly gentleman right across from me leans over and asks, in heavily accented Finnish, if I am from Canada. He thought that I must be because he recognized my French accent! I am at a loss for words, firstly because I can’t believe he pegged me so accurately and so quickly, and secondly for the French accent. I politely (because I am a Canadian) say “Why yes, I am, but I don’t have a French accent….” He insists and I am still so dumbfounded that I don’t argue. I discover that he has lived in Canada for 45 years and he works in construction, roofs, eaves troughs, etc, etc. and that his daughter lives in Whitby and he lives in Oshawa. The most important information exchanged, he explains to me that he is travelling with his wife and his sister, her son, his wife and their daughter. Soon we are all engaged in animated conversation about Canada, politics, Finland, real estate and life in general.

We also discover that our Finnish/Canadian friend is returning for the first time since he was 8 years old to his hometown of Vyborg with his family: about 1/3 of the population of Finland lived in the Karelia Peninsula, and were forced to flee in the early 1940s because of the Russian invasion. It remains an emotional and sometimes hotly disputed episode in the Finish history. As we pull into the train station in Vyborg, the sister stands and begins to point out the major land marks of the quaint town, almost to herself. Soon the family is engaged in their memories and history as the train shudders to a stop and they wait for their passports which, along with ours, were confiscated at the Finnish/Russian border by stereotypical looking Russian officials.

I feel honoured and somewhat humbled by what I have just witnessed.

St. Petersburg beckons and we arrive at the new Ladoga Station at about 2:30. Our guide for this part of the journey, Nico, is waiting for us on the platform. A negotiated taxi ride later, we are in our hotel on a very quiet canal in the Kolomna area of the city, a short distance from the St. Nicholas Cathedral and the Mariinsky Theatre. We drop our bags and start our first day in St. Petersburg.


From left: St. Isaac’s; The Admiralty; The Winter Palace with the Alexander Column


From left: The Admiralty (foreground) & the Fortress of Peter and Paul (background); around the Nevskiy Prospekt; The Church of the Spilt Blood

We happily cram in all the major sights in about 3 hours of walking around before we take a boat cruise through the Fontanka and Moika rivers, seeing some wonderful architecture. We are rewarded at every turn by beautiful examples of Baroque, Imperial and Art Nouveau – some beautifully restored and some just waiting. St. Petersburg is an incredible visual city: everywhere you look you are overwhelmed by the beauty and variety of architecture, history and spectacle. Our eyes drink it all in.

The sun is still high in the sky as we settle into a restaurant opposite the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevskiy Prospekt, where Nico persuades us to toast our arrival in the traditional Russian way – with cold Russian vodka (more, when all is said and done, than is wise), some borscht, and the raucous, Russian daylight/nightlife taking place just outside the restaurant door.

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