March 26 - Elaborate

Elaborate - a word that St Petersburg's Hermitage museum epitomises. Intricate and rich in detail - involving many carefully arranged parts - complicated in design...

Look up and you see the chandeliers, almost lost among the rich detail of the ceilings, walls and galleries above. Look down and you see incredible parquetry floors and intricate mosaics - and that is before you even start on the amazing display in the galleries where you can stand within centimetres of masterworks from past centuries. To explore the Hermitage in detail would take weeks, we had just one day but it was an amazing place.

February 9 - Character

Rasputin was quite a character! Having convinced the Russian queen that he was the only person who could treat her son for haemophilia, he also became her lover. In the basement of the Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg, home of one of Russia's most wealthy and favoured families, a dastardly plot was carried out to murder the 'mad monk'. He was invited there for a meal which had been poisoned, but apparently after waiting a respectable amount of time for the poison to work, it had no effect, so they shot him and he ran away - eventually they tracked him through the snow, attacked him again, rolled him into a rug and drowned him in the Neva river (just to be certain he was finished!). The palace is spectacular in its own right, and in the basement rooms there are wax figures showing the scene where the conspirators entertained Rasputin with his last meal. It's more fascinating than anything else as you get to walk the corridors under the palace with a Russian guide.