Peter's Travel Blog

It’s been a hard day today, with resumption of my classes. Hard because I was still feeling under the weather from last night. I felt a little better this morning, but three intense classes on the difficult subject of Perspective (I had them painting the Church on the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg) took its toll. By late afternoon, I was...

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...