Just as I thought spring was coming and the sun was beginning to feel warm, it started snowing – proper Russian snow which blew horizontally and felt like it was cutting you with every flake. Suddenly the city was a white mist, and the guard uniforms and solid palace walls made a little more sense.

My trip to the Peter and Paul Fortress was abandoned, though the snow certainly gave an edge to the Trubetskoy Bastion (where Dostoevsky, Trotsky and Gorky among thousands of others were imprisoned); I had been in danger of thinking the concrete cells looked reasaonably decent. Instead, I retreated to the metro and went to a rather more downmarket part of St Petersburg to visit the appartment where Dostoevsky lived for the last three years of his life. There were just six rooms, furnished as they had been during his lifetime. It was very simple, with a few little details about him as a person, like his love of shopping, and on the table in the main room was a cigarette box where his daughter had written “28th January. Today papa died.”

The next day things were back to normal.

I think I’ve only seen one really Russian church so far – the Church of our Saviour on Spilled Blood, with its splendid mosiac interior and shrine to where Alexander II was mortally wounded. Its infamous exterior, with its colourful onion domes and decorative brickwork, is so beautiful – I love the way it all bulges with life.

However, mostly the churches here are famous for being unusual and baroque. These churches have grown on me the more of them I see. St Isaac’s Cathedral, which was briefly converted into a museum of atheism, has over 100kg of gold leaf, six enormous malachite columns, and two lapis lazuli columns that were infused with myrrh during construction. I have learned so much about marble and other stones over the past week! I think my favourite is the pink rhodonite from the Urals.

In between visiting churches and pretty buildings, my command of the Russian language extends to directions and food, but not proper conversations. This clearly really annoys some people: on my final day I needed to use an internet cafe, but couldn’t work out how to say what I wanted in Russian and resorted to English. The man behind the desk pulled up Google translate and we typed out a comprehensible and reasonable exchange. Then when I got up to pay, he started typing a very long paragraph and showed it to me: it turned out to be a huge diatribe about you foreigners coming to our country expecting us to speak English when I just live at home and have never learned English and never will, etc….. I stared back at him not knowing what to do with this, and then must have smiled in bemusement because the next thing he typed was simply, “Your laughter disgusts me.” So I just walked off and that was the end of that!

I said my farewell to St Petersburg by going to the post office for stamps. Apparently, none of the Russians in the hostel had really seen stamps before and they oohed and aahed at them very excitedly. After our obligatory goodbye photo for facebook, I left to catch the train to Moscow.

I’ll miss the grand streets (though not the three miles of Nevsky Prospekt), all the palaces and lovely types of marble, and the endless feeling of being cultured. But luckily there’s still a lot more left to do for next time.