day 97, St Petersburg

Woke up having had an ok sleep, had a few snorers in my room but ah well. Nazim (our guide) met us around 10:30 and took us to a pancake place for breakfast, which was lovely. From there we got on the metro (which is in itself very cool, there are lights every 3-4 metres and I counted 23 of these lights, so the elevator must be about 69-80 ish metres long). From the metro we went round a massive supermarket to get a picnic lunch then onto a half hour bus before arriving to Peterhoff, a palace which was the summer residence of the royal family with plenty of fountains, canals and grass areas, which backed on to the sea. We had a good lunch on the beach before having a wander around for a few hours taking everything in, which was amazing. Taking the bus and metro back we went  out for a boat ride round st Petersburg with a rather flamboyant guide who had taught himself an incredible standard of English and pronounced everything with as much syllables and accentuate-ing as possible. It was really good to see st Petersburg from that angle and listen to lots of different facts about the place. It was also pretty damn choppy out there and wasn’t unhappy to get off the boat in the end. After that we went  out for dinner to a traditional Georgian restaurant and had a lovely meal, I had this soup thing with chilli, beef, tomato rice and broth and it was awesome, reminded me of a curry which was washed down with some wheat beer brewed in that building. Main was this lamb stew with vegetables and it was gorgeous, proper hearty food with a bit of a kick to it. The evening was slightly spoiled by Andy’s camera being nicked out his bag in the restaurant, which was a shame, so the group split, the rest to go to the pub, me nazim and andy to check out the police station, which was closed, so me and andy went to a traditional English pub (not out of choice, we wanted to watch the football) had a pint and watched the second half, which wasn’t great, before heading on to see the bridges rise up to let the ships past and also popping past the winter palace all lit up and also the cool church which reminded me off aladin. The bridges were very cool, they were lit up and you saw them go up, then once they were up it was surprisingly tall, sorta like inception when leo and ellen page walk up the right angle wall.  We walked home and got into bed bout half 2.