At he Hermitage there was lots of art and sculptures. It was built by Catherine the great or she got others to make it and she got lots of artists to help. It is the oldest museum in the world I think. In the war it got bombed lots of times by Hitler, he wanted to flatten St. Petersburg, but especially the Hermitage, lucky he didn’t. He was the ruler of Germany at the time and wanted to expand his land. He killed himself cause everyone else wanted to kill him at the end of the war. He didn’t sound like a very nice man.

The Russian food is much more like Australian food or the food we have at home. I kind of like it more than Chinese or Mongolian food. My favourite food in Russia is jacket potatoes with little bits of meat and butter. My favourite sweet food here are the meringues and jelly that we found at a nice bakery.

This is where we stayed at Irene’s apartment – she was awesome to let us stay there. She’s from SERVAS.

The subway in St. Petersburg was so deep and the escalators were so long – we timed the escalators it took 2min and 48 sec to get to the top or the bottom. Mummy estimated that the length of the escalators were between 100 and 110m long.

When we were in St Petersburg we talked to our class from our school on Skype – that was really fun and we want to do that more often.

In the summer gardens there were lots of fountains. Kalika got told off by one of the people who were watching cause she was trying to balance on the edge of the fountain. There were also lots of statues but most of them were of men. There was also a palace in the corner where Catherine the great came to for her holidays – but it wasn’t very far from the winter palace so I don’t know why they bothered moving.

Yasi