"Had one Vodka, then one more…” but maybe not as many as I would have liked Friendly staff at the Soul Kitchen St. Petersburg has a lot of hostels as it’s only a short hop for most Europeans (I’m so jealous!), but there were Australians here too. It was good hearing a bit of news from home. Australia was having elections and we now had our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. I didn't realise that I missed it, but it was fun to have a casual group of people to go sightseeing with and with whom you could converse without having to struggle with the language. On the BBC news on TV – I heard that it was now 38oC and that there were four hundred fires burning in Russia. Putin was shown photogenically arriving in a helicopter and helping to douse the flames. This hostel also had free internet and free international phone calls, if you could ever get near the phone. One young man asked me how long I’d been travelling. After I replied, “Probably since the 70’s,” ...
Practising Geographer - nature culture places people