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What’s to be said about Kaipeda? I don’t think anyone was entirely sure what to expect. When we got there at around midday, there was a slightly embarrassing delay of about an hour as our captain tried to park us in a tight space between a small cargo ship and what looked like a small naval ship. I’m always reminded...

Helsinki, Finland A week ago, if you’d asked me to point to Finland on a blank map of the world, I would have struggled. If you’d then asked me what the capital of Finland is, I wouldn’t have known; such is the diabolical state of my geographical knowledge (which might account for how badly I did in Geography in my...

This morning, we visited ‘The Hermitage’, four former palace buildings all bolted together to make one of the largest museum/galleries in the world. The place is so large, it has approximately one thousand rooms, and millions of works of art. The guide in my group (Nadia) told us someone had calculated that if you were to look at every piece...

Today, we arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia. First job of the day, after eating breakfast, was to go out onto the open deck, to assess how cold it was. Answer: VERY COLD! Zero-degrees centigrade, to be precise, with a snap to take your breath away. From where we were berthed, all you could see were the port terminal buildings, and...

Today, we arrived in Tallin, Estonia. With all the information we’d read about how beautiful the city is, we bounded out of bed at the 8am alarm, donned our fleeces, grabbed our cameras, and eagerly dashed upstairs to see our arrival in port. Unfortunately; when we got there, you couldn’t see anything through the thick fog. Our approach was slow...