So the prospect of an early morning flight brings out the usual mixture of paranoia and over-caution. As students, we'd probably have turned up on the last train the night before, spending a BK-fuelled night reading and playing cards. These days, though, we want to minimise our departure lounge time and get a sensible amount of sleep in our own home, while also leaving enough leeway for cock-ups.

Aiming to get to Heathrow the advised two hours before our 6:45 SAS flight, we'd originally thought about using a combination of night buses, estimating that 2:00 would be a sensible time to leave Sutton. And so, when we finally decided to wisely invest £40 in a more comfortable mode of transport, we forgot to adjust the timing accordingly, ending up in a near-deserted (and Arctic air-conditioned) Heathrow at 3am. Oops. Still, at least Starbucks was open, and their filter coffee is perfectly adequate, especially when it gives you a chance to escape that lethal blast of air-conditioning.

One smooth flight to Stockholm and another to St Petersburg and here we are in Russia. One of our holidays wouldn't be complete without a long, sweaty walk in the wrong direction; well... we weren't actually heading in the wrong direction this time, but when we boldly jumped off the bus at a vaguely promising junction, we failed to realise just how long Moskovsky Prospekt was. More importantly, we failed to realise just how far we were from where we needed to be. Oh well, a good long walk with heavy rucksacks is always good for the health, and our introduction to the St Petersburg Metro system (only 8 roubles, approximately 16p, per ticket) got us close enough to our hotel.

So, Adrian's first impressions of St Petersburg... well, overall it's a bit of a mess, and needs some serious money spending on it. Where that money's going to come from, though, is another matter... don't they have big organisations for that sort of thing? Once you get into the centre, especially along Nevsky Prospekt and all the streets leading from it, you start to see all the architectural gems where so much of the city's history is preserved. We only had a quick introductory wander down Nevsky this evening, but the main thing we've noticed today is how everything is so stupidly cheap. Not just the underground tickets, but all forms of public transport and daily life. We dined for £7 each at the Stroganoff Yard Cafe (see pic)... shared salad, a main course each and a litre and a half of good Russian beer.

Bed...

Well, Adrian's just gone to get us a couple of well-earned beers, so I'll add a few first impressons after a day and a half in St Petersburg. Enormous painted buildings... lots of pillars... row upon row of windows... traffic... wide roads... dust... heat. Those are the first things that spring to mind. Everything is really cheap; 90p for a half-litre of beer, 16p for a metro journey, £14 for a meal with drinks for two people. Roads, buildings, tube stations... everything seems to be on a very large scale. The cathedrals are massive; we visited St Isaac's (see pic right), Kazan and the Church on Spilled Blood (see pic left) today, and they all have huge pillars, massive domes and lots of marble everywhere. They forgot about taste when they built (quite recently) the Spilled Blood place with all those multi-coloured onion domes in gold, blue and green, but it has a crazy sort of chocolate box charm.

One thing that is definitely needed here is a congestion charge of some kind, or some sort of traffic re-routing. All the main highlights, including canals, squares and Nevsky Prospekt (which we walked up and down today) are massively congested. Lorries, cars (mostly Ladas) buses and lots of fumes. Even worse than London before the Congestion Charge.

One more observation before I concentrate on the beer that Adrian has so kindly bought for me... we went to the Literature Cafe earlier for a cup of tea. Very civilised it was too, with live violin/piano music, if a bit snooty. Apparently Pushkin met his second there, before going off to fight (and be killed) in a duel. Poor Pushkin.

Having popped into the Stroganoff Yard Cafe again, this time to dodge a thunderstorm, there's a chance to catch up. After eating last night at a Humphrey Bogart themed restaurant called... er, Bogart's, we pretty much collapsed back into our hotel room. Continuing with the literary theme we started yesterday with the Pushkin cafe, we explored the area around Sennaya Ploshchad (Haymarket), where Dostoyevsky lived and set 'Crime and Punishment' (see pic). Like a lot of St Petersburg, it's a polluted, crumbling mess for the most part, but probably a lot better than the slum area it was in the nineteenth century.

Nowadays, there's a few things worth looking at... The enormous Mariinsky Theatre (home of the Kirov Ballet; we saw conductor-in-residence Valery Gergiev at the Proms a couple of weeks ago)... the St Nicholas Cathedral, which looks like a huge Wedgewood vase with a golden lid*... the English Quay, with great panoramic views across the River Neva... the Yusupov Palace, where old Ra-Ra-Rasputin met his violent end. Once again, we walked miles, so it was a pleasant surprise to happen upon the Idiot Cafe, allowing us to continue the Dostoyevsky theme with some tea, cake and complimentary vodka. Like yesterday's Literature Cafe, the Idiot had a kind of old English colonial charm... dark decor and soft leather sofas.

Landing back at our hotel in the evening, we decided our legs would only carry us as far as the pizzeria on floor 13, followed by the lobby bar. Probably the sort of prices that would turn a Russian off, but £1.60 for a pint of good German-style beer wasn't going to hurt our Western pockets too much.

[*And thereby hangs another tale... amid the dual busloads of Italian and Russian tourists and the funeral cortege (we didn't actually realise it was a funeral until I'd inadvertently photographed them taking the coffin from the hearse in front of the bell tower) a well-bearded and Wedgewood-blue-robed priest appeared and went to talk to a young woman in an SUV. After a while he seemed to be blessing her tiny baby and then, producing a holy water dispensing utensil, starting blessing the car. We're always complaining about people pointlessly using SUVs for city driving in the UK and US, but having them blessed as well... just a tad paranoid?]