The riverfront of St. Petersburg has a wind straight from a Siberian winter. The wide River Neva flows like a great choppy sea under grand bridges, past the Winter Palace and Russia’s imperial past. My ears burn from the cold. Wandering around, I realise where my awkward sense of familiarity comes from; the city reminds me of Amsterdam. Not necessarily in looks, but in the canals taking wide arcs through the city. I realise this because I am lost, or at least finding it difficult to get my bearings, and I found this in the first city I ever went backpacking to, Amsterdam. St. Petersburg really does have the air of a grand European city, of Paris or Rome; the dirt and the splendour and the ashtrays in cafés.

I make my way to the Zoom Café, finding it after some effort to circumvent the roadworks going on around me. This is roadworks Russian style, digging up the entire street, quite literally. There are no safety barriers and sand covers the narrow space between the buildings and the work site, full of large deep holes and huge concrete pipes. I watch a group of glamorous young ladies teetering across the street as the pointed heels of their high leather boots sink into the sand. The Zoom Café is a very pleasant place in a kind of cellar with vaulted ceilings full of fashionable young students, smoking as they eat.