After yesterday’s seven hour-long hike through the city, we opted for a lazier mode of exploration. We took the metro again to Saint Petersburg’s busiest street, Nevsky Prospekt, and boarded a hop-on-hop-off red bus where we proceeded to buy a family day-ticket allowing additional passage on boats that tour the city’s many canals and rivers. Not only is this option less tiring on little legs, it is fun and informative: you get an audio guide to run you down some of the key la

The three-hour time zone and 24-hour journey from Abidjan to Saint Petersburg meant we all slept in a bit (9am in parenting terms is midday) before venturing down to the nearest metro station, Fruzenskaya. Gorkovskaya metro station, which is where we aimed to start the walking tour we had discovered in the hotel guide, was four stops away and our first introduction to the Russian ‘underground.' As the train doors opened at Fruzenskaya station the smell of Saturday night’s vod

I have waited months to be able to use the Bond cliché and now that I can, I will have to find the will power to not give every blog post written in Russia the same title. We arrived in Saint Petersburg via Dubai from Abidjan earlier today. It was not the grand entry we had initially planned for the Russia leg of our trip: riding into Moscow from the far eastern city of Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian railway. Yet the four of us are delighted to be able to continue our drea