Travel experiences across the world
My time in the city of the tsars has come to an end! This morning I took a seemingly endless cab ride to Moskovskaya Station; Nevsky Prospekt is a very wide and long, straight avenue, but there's so much traffic that it takes forever to ride along. Sidenote: does anybody else find it confusing to… Continue reading From St Petersburg to Moscow
Getting up and walking is becoming harder every day! Tomorrow's four-hour train ride to Moscow is starting to feel very attractive right now!Today we took the busy metro down to Nevsky and then up to Gorkovskaya to visit the Peter and Paul Fortress, a military encampment from which the city of Saint Petersburg eventually grew.… Continue reading Peter and Paul Fortress, canals, St Isaac Cathedral
Today the first order of business was our second and final visit to the Hermitage, thanks to our two-day tickets. I heartily recommend them!Yesterday's visit was very thorough and exhausting, so today I wanted to focus just on a few exhibits that I'd missed. The first among them was the Graeco-Roman sculpture wing on the… Continue reading The Hermitage: Round 2, the Church on the Spilled Blood
This crisp, sunny morning it was time to go straight to the main course of the trip, the crown jewel of St Petersburg: the Hermitage museum!Turns out Vasilievsky island isn't as well connected as I'd hoped, despite being geographically very close to the historic centre, so we ended taking a taxi. The driver was typically… Continue reading The Hermitage Museum
Another year, another adventure! This time, we're off to Russia! First St Petersburg, then Moscow. Time to put my six months of Russian lessons to the test!I flew in last night with Finnair, via Helsinki. Vantaa airport has hardwood floors -be still my beating heart- but they also sell reindeer hides, like, hope you didn't… Continue reading Peterhof
The sun shone bright this morning when we left Kanazawa and took the shinkansen back to Tokyo. As usual, the 10:56 train left the station at 10:56 on the dot. Going back to Paris is going to be devastating after these two weeks.We arrived at Tokyo Station two hours and change later, just in time… Continue reading Tokyo’s National Art Centre
I've been thwarted! Foiled! My grand idea for today was to go to Takayama, a well-preserved old town in the mountains. I'd researched beforehand that you can get there by train from Kanazawa via Toyama, but today when checking the timetables I saw that there are only like three trains a day between Toyama and… Continue reading The 21st Century Contemporary Art Museum, gold foil
After a big, hearty breakfast at the hotel, the first order of business today was to visit Kenroku-en, Kanazawa's most famous attraction and one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan. Its name means "Garden of the Six Attributes" because it has all six classical attributes that a garden is supposed to have in the… Continue reading Kenroku-en and Nagamachi
Although it rained heavily all throughout the night, by the time we left our apartment with our bags the morning was cloudy but dry. Today saw us on the road again, as we took a THUNDERBIRD train to Kanazawa. With such a bombastic name I had assumed it'd be a state-of-the-art shinkansen, but it's in… Continue reading Hiyashi Chaya-gai
Surprise day trip!So I was looking at the guidebook yesterday, planning what to do today, and I came to a realisation. There are a million things in Kyoto that I still haven't seen; between 2013 and this trip I've spent a combined eight days in this city and I still feel like I'm only scratching… Continue reading Hiroshima Peace Memorial
This Is A Lake 