Sopho

Well so much for blogging from every country... I'm now 4 countries on from my last blog! After Kiev we headed on up to Budapest. I have been there before and have a friend there so I mostly just hung out with her since we didn't have much time there. We did go to the castle again, which is my favourite bit of Budapest. There was a wine festival going on with loads of stalls and things and I came very close to buying myself a bow and arrows until it was pointed out that I wouldn't be able to take that back on the Eurostar... Boo. We also did a little cruise on the river at night when everything was lit up which was beautiful. Then we carried on up to Bratislava, which is beautiful ... read more

I also went to Bratislava! (I want the country to be in red on the map, but didn't blog from here!)... read more

Before I forget, video diary 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwptSSazQg&feature=youtube_gdata And video diary 4 (which is my personal favourite!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCFLUGeW6U&feature=youtube_gdata So yes, St Petersburg was beautiful. We wandered around the city to see all the famous churches etc and went round the Hermitage. We managed to see quite a lot of it I think. By the end we had very sore feet and felt all cultured out. I particularly enjoyed the State Rooms and the 19th & 20th Century art. We also met some guys who had bought a bus from an old people's home and taken out the seats and put in bunk beds and a sofa and were driving it from London to Bankok! Which is pretty darn cool. We then got a train at 2:40 am back to Moscow, because we couldn't go straight from St ... read more

Woah long time eh? From now on in my blogs will get more frequent (sorry about that) because I want to blog from each city we go to, which will be every couple of days after leaving Russia. Anywho, so last week in Mongolia was fun. We met a load of Peace Corps volunteers and mostly just hung out with them for the week. Ralph and I did attempt to do an excursion, 'attempt' being the optimum word. We rented a tent and sleeping bags and stuff and had this 2 day hike planned out to Terelj, but we made it about 10 minutes outside of the city before deciding it was too hot, and our bags were too heavy, and there was a river we could see that looked very inviting for a swim. So ... read more

Wow I haven't blogged in a really long time! So for those not on facebook, I did indeed get my Russian visa in the end, much celebration ensued. The rest of my time in Hong Kong was good fun, I went to Noah's Ark (which was as hilarious as I expected, but also a lot more interesting than I expected since it had lots of information about various attempts to find the remains of it on Mount Arrarat, and information about modern projects inspired by the story, such as Frozen Ark, which is a collection of DNA samples of every animal of the world to try and combat extinction), and I also went to several temples, including the 10,000 Buddahs temple, which as the name suggests, has over 10,000 gold buddah statues in it and on ... read more