Who wants to join me?

Here’s a run down of our picks of museums in the motherland’s canal-city:

Dostoevsky Museum

191002, Kuznechny Pereulok 5/2, +7 (812) 311-4031, Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm

More of an exhibition than a straightforward museum, this is a slightly clinical restoration of the author’s last residence.  A selection of, seemingly unrelated, lithographs dominates the floor below the writer’s pad through which you have to pass to get to the upper-rooms. Fascinating and more visceral than most museums, this place is only slightly over-priced at 150R.

N.B.  You can also visit the infamous flat where the protagonist commits murder in Crime And Punishment. It is within a residential building in the outskirts of the city, but apparently the residents are quite used to camera snappers and don’t mind visitors turning up. You’re best bet is to ask the staff at the museum for more information!

The Museum Of Erotica

Furshtatskaya embankment, 47/11a tel.: (812) 320 76 00 Open daily: 8.00 to 21.30

This is a strange little place, which operates both as a museum and a venereal disease clinic. Asking visitors to pop on shoe covers, the sparsely dressed nurse behind the reception desk appeared more embarrassed than even we felt, when we visited. The ‘musuem’ as it turns out, consist simply of four or five glass cabinets of erotica paraphernalia, ranging from tacky toy penises to cheeky postcards.

However, the museum’s crowning jewel is Rasputin’s preserved penis, which sits at the ends of a corridor in a big jar of formaldehyde. The penis is, apparently, of scientific relevance, due to the former owner’s significance  in Russian social  history and the size of the organ (which, it does have to be noted, is unusually big).

Penquin’s Popular Classics series are ideal for travellers. Consisting of  classic novels (which are so much better than a lot of the dirge hanging around hostel bookswap shelves – Andy McNab anyone?) condensed into a couple of hundred pages and sold for £2 at bookstores all over the world.

Offering a chance to catch up with the reading you never got time for back home (that’s what 17 hour bus journeys were designed for, right?),  these  cute volume, that just  slip  into your backpack,  really are the ideal for enthuastic travellers.

On various trips I have read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (picked up from Istanbul International Airport) and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (bought in Kiev), and we are keeping our eyes open for the many other titles in the series (I’ve got my fingers crossed for a bit of Wilde or Poe) .

The catch? Well for £2 you don’t get a cover design, the paper is as cheap as paper gets and the binding tends to fall apart after a couple of  reads.