Well, I safely got to Russia and back. The journey was considerably simpler than previous dealings with immigration in Russia (notably last year's stop in Moscow on our way to Mongolia). In fact it actually took longer to check in to the hotel than it did to clear customs and immigration at St. Petersburg airport. The JUG visit was great fun and if you want to see some pictures the official Russian JUG web site report is here, and there's some more photos from one of the attendees, here. Despite not having translation available (and my Russian being limited to privet, dosvadanya and spasiba) the audience were obviously able to understand what I was saying judging by the questions I got afterwards, many of which were very in depth and technical. As you will see from the photos we also enjoyed a beer afterwards, which to me is the best part of any presentation.

Fortunately, I also got enough time to do some site seeing while I was there which was very rewarding as St Petersburg is a place I've wanted to go to for quite a while now. On Sunday I managed an epic five hours in the Hermitage museum, and I probably only got to see about half of what's there. The collection is bigger than that at the Louvre in Paris. It's always feels a little weird to be in places where significant historical things have happened. Part of the museum is the Winter Palace which was the residence of the Tsar until 1917. In a small dining room there is a clock that is stopped at ten past two; this was the time early in the morning on 26 October 1917 when the ministers of the Provisional Government were arrested in this room. I also went to the cathedral in Peter Paul fortress which is the final resting place of the Romanov dynasty from Peter the Great to the last Russian Tsar, Alexander II.

Here's an image of Palace Square, taken from inside the Hermitage museum (I was probably standing inside the Winter Palace at the time which, whilst not the Hermitage itself, is part of the museum). As you can see the weather was decidedly snowy, but compared to Canada the temperature was a balmy -1C.

I discovered when creating this blog entry that there's no easy way to include a picture. Yes, you can put in a link, but if you don't have some publicly accessible site on which to put the picture you're a bit stuffed. For the above photo I rather cheekily borrowed a few bytes on my girlfriend's business website, travelaine.com. Since it's an on-line travel agency and I did a lot of the web design I figure she won't mind.

I'm in the City (of London) tomorrow to present to another JUG and then talk to some people about Java performance on big Sun hardware. Should be interesting. I don't have any events planned for next week which means I'll get some quality time to sit down and do some real coding type work. There's certainly no shortage of things I want to do.