From Vilnius we caught an over night train to St Petersburg. Our apartment was on the main street running through town, Nevsky Prospect or Nnnyeeeevski Proooovspekt as it is announced much to our amusement on the Metro. Nnnyeeeevski Proooovspekt! We had a fairly quiet first day really. We went to pick up the tickets for the next stage of the journey from our friend John. However when we got there he realised he'd lost them. Oops. Two tickets to Moscow thrown out with the rubbish. Luckily he was able to get them re-issued although it sounds as though it was a complete nightmare. Russians seem to have a great fondness for bureocracy. The process involved many forms,lots of signatures, much confusion and of course a fine. Something he tells us you get used to after a short time of living in Russia. It seems that as well as the liking for official documentation that corruption and bribes are very much an accepted part of everyday life. 30 kph over the speed limit? 300 rubles = no problem. While we were over at John's we went to the supermarket, where we bought some of the amazing salads the seem to sell pretty much ...

We arrived in Vilnius at 5am after an uncomfortable night of broken sleep and numb body parts on an overnight coach from Warsaw. The journey had been going well, we'd managed to get the whole back seat to ourselves and I'd been asleep for a couple of hours but at 1am I was woken suddenly by a scary lady slapping my legs and shouting at me. I guessed she wanted me to move up, so I moved over to sit with Andy and for the remaining 4 hours it was all but impossible to get back to sleep. The lady in the chair in front was rather large to say the least and every time we went over a bump, which was about every 5 minutes, her chair bounced back with the weight an banged into my knees. I thought the whole chair was going to collapse and she'd crush me. What a nightmare. We made it alive though and luckily our hostel, the Old Town Hostel was not too far from the station. We dropped our bags off and had a snooze in the common room until our room was available. The room turned out to be really nice. Practically a ...

We left Berlin from the Hauptbahnhof station which is absolutely incredible, like an enormous machine with trains on different levels and a central kind of hub of shops, escalators and lifts criss-crossing above and below you. It was all really well organised as well, you could pretty much guarantee the train was going to arrive exactly the minute it was timetabled to. The train itself was pretty cool, quite old school. We were in a carriage with two other people, one of which kept trying to talk to me despite the fact I clearly had absolutely no idea what she was saying. Going to have to get used to that I suppose. It was funny, I think crossing over into Poland was the first place I've been that really seems very different. An announcement would go off sounding like someone shouting something very important, but you would have no idea what. And every half hour or so a guard would come round to check you tickets, again shouting something completely incomprehensible. We saw this great sign by the emergency stop devise. Loving the translation. Before we left we'd joined couch-surfing and Warsaw was to be our first go at it, so ...

Just had a really lovely weekend in Machynlleth, Wales, lots of cider, dancing, sleeping, walking and eating. Pretty much all of my favorite things all in one weekend infact. Yay! While we were there we went to a very nice restaurant that deserves a mention, in the Wynnstay Hotel. It was Sunday night so the place was pretty quiet, in fact the restaurant is kind of divided into small dining rooms, and we had one of the rooms to ourselves. It's really cosy, a bit like being in someone's house (if they were incredibly minted and had a huge house with several posh dining rooms), and the staff were all very friendly, didn't rush you, or take too long blah blah blah. Oh and also they have a huge wine list, which they have won several awards for. While the place is probably better suited to meat eaters, (they have a pretty impressive range of local lamb and beef, and do quite a few different game/fish things too), there were a few veggi options, so we were ok. I'm gonna moan now though, why do most places think the only thing veggis want to eat is cheese, and specifically goats ...

This Christmas I have mostly been eating. And drinking. And eating more. I've probably eaten more over the past couple of weeks than I did for the whole of the rest of the year... ok maybe that's a bit silly, but it was definitely a lot. Very nice it has been too, lovely people, lovely food and lots of fun. The feasting started a few weeks ago with the first of 3 Christmas meals we somehow volunteered to make for people. For the main course I'd made a Mushroom Wellington, which was so nice we decided to make the same thing for the other two Christmas meals. (Image nicked from Yum Blog - hope you don't mind! ;-)) Mushroom Wellington 500g Puff Pastry 60ml sunflower oil 675g onions, chopped 4 garlic clove, crushed 450g chestnut mushrooms, left whole 2 tbsp chopped tarragon 4 tbsp soy sauce salt and fresh ground black pepper 320g broken cashew pieces 175g fine breadcrumbs, freshly made, white or wholemeal 320g ground almonds 1 egg, beaten Roll out the puff pastry into two rectangles, each 30 x 23 cm, and set aside in the fridge to rest. Meanwhile, make the filling. Heat ...