Author Description

In 2010 I enrolled for a summer school Russian course at the St Petersburg State University ( the oldest in Russia) and then spent a month hopping on and off planes and trains across Siberia from St Petersburg to Vladivostok -stopping in many of the historical towns en route.Why did I do this? The short answer is a romantic fascination with this vast country and its people who are neither fully Western nor completely Eastern. It started with a challenging school assignment to write an essay about Catherine the great’s foreign policy. This was hard to get my 18 year old mind around and the itch of my curiosity grew from there. This the story of how I scratched it.