Saint Petersburg, January 2026 — a cinema with no Hollywood The cold in Saint Petersburg in winter is total. It settles into the streets, into the light, into the pace of people walking. The Neva is frozen, the palaces glow amber. And on one of the first evenings of January, looking for somewhere warm, we ended up in a cinema. The listings gave me nothing I recognised. Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all major Hollywood studios pulled out of Russia. What remai

Before leaving for Saint Petersburg, the hometown of my boyfriend Georgii, I had created a long Google Maps list of places I wanted to visit. Far more than I would realistically have time for in one week. Among them, on Georgii’s recommendation, was the Fabergé Museum. I expected to admire the famous jewelled eggs. What I did not expect was how much the museum would reveal about Imperial Russia, about ritual and domesticity, and about the objects people preserve through time.

This past winter, my family gathered in Chamonix for a week of ski touring and a couple of days on the slopes. it was a return, the last time we had all been here together was around 2010, over Easter. I remember the huge amount of snow, the heaviest snowfalls I had ever experienced at the time and probably still among the most impressive today. We were not quite as lucky with the conditions this year, but that uncertainty has become part of our annual Christmas ski touring w

I had been wanting to make this journey for a long time. This past New Year’s Eve finally gave me the occasion: visiting my boyfriend’s hometown, Saint Petersburg. Winter 2025. Visa arranged in less than a week, flights booked from Munich via Istanbul, one of the few viable routes. A slightly complicated journey, but perhaps fitting for a destination that had, for a long time, felt just out of reach. 29 December 2025 I land late at night at Pulkovo Airport (Пулково). In my ba