The City of Bridges.

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The morning started getting the speedy Allegra express train from Helsinki to St Petersburg, the train took about 3 hours and reached a whopping 220k per hour. My attempts of a snooze were interrupted twice be customs on both sides of the border. Our B&B host advised us of a good all you could eat. I made the big mistake of nodding in agreement with a staff member who was telling me in Russian how it worked. In the end it was obvious I hadn't a clue and it's fair to say they were laughing at and not with us ?.
We took a nice stroll exploring the architecture of the city and realised we need a bus tour because we don't know the full history. We do know it was built by Peter the Great in 1703, built in a swamp. If only he was around to have built the M50!!. We found a church which had mass on and attended, the sound was really good. The city is known as the city of Bridges, at12:30am we took a night boat tour, great Idea except it was in Russian, we did have a chap kindly translate for us parts of it or he could of been making it up haha
The Curious Incident of the black cat and the man with the ladder!!
One tourist spot is a cast iron black cat, high up on a ledge. If you throw a coin up and it stays up on the ledge you make a wish and it comes through. We were wondering, what happens the money. Well around 9:30pm we were outside enjoying some Russian refreshments when a chap with a ladder climbed up the ladder, and was making it look like he was switching on the street lights which came on at the same time, he then climbed further up and collected the money from the cat. Got down from ladder checked no one was looking. To make a long boring story a short boring story, it was a scam. He made it look like he turned on the lights when they come on automatically anyways, sounds like a case for Inspector Sergiy Clusov!!

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