We awaken in our over-priced hotel, decide to lie-in as long as possible, and go back to sleep. We head for breakfast at 10.30am. There’s a large dining room, with a huge buffet - cereals, fruits, yogurts, hams, bean mix, breads, hot dogs (!), jams, salads, porridge, cakes etc. Some people are eating huge piles of food, perhaps re-couping their over-charged hotel bills. Iain’s eyes are bigger than his stomach. I have cereal, cheese and cucumber sandwiches, a chocolate wafer (healthy!), two coffees, 3 orange juices, and steal a banana for later. Nothing like a good English breakfast, but 100 times better than the skanky hostel breakfast.

[Shop window on Nevsky Prospekt]

Back to the room to pack. We check out at 12pm, leaving our bags in the cloakroom. The bloke expects a tip - ha! It's raining outside. We didn’t bring any waterproofs out, just an umbrella. After some debate on what we want to do today, we resolve to have a short day and do more tomorrow, on our last day. We're a bit low on energy and both of us have achy feet.

We haven’t been into the Spilled Blood cathedral yet, so we decide to do this. Onto the Metro. It's pretty wet through. We take advantage of an Internet café near the canal to spod whilst hoping it stops raining. E-mail home, check news and flights.

It's still raining about 45 minutes later, when we head outside. As ever, the big obvious queue is the wrong one, foreigners queue inside the cathedral. The inside is fantastic. There are floor to ceiling mosaics, bursting with colour. The different walls have different themes - miracles on one, the nativity on another. Simple, effective and beautiful. Like an explosion in an Opal Fruit factory.

Lots of tour groups in here have blue bags on their feet. We were nearly given some but then the offer was withdrawn, for no obvious reason.

Around the back of the cathedral, there's one panel which hasn't been restored since the Siege of Leningrad, showing shell damage.

In the tourist market, we buy a McLenin’s t-shirt and few presents. American cruise lines dump their tourists here, and the stall-holders want money in dollars (which is illegal). There's a wide variety of матрешка dolls - Winnie the Pooh, Michael Jordan, Bush, Clinton etc. Nasty! Lots of colour but most of the stalls are the same. Some militia memorabilia (boo), amber, crystal, fur hats. We see a quality t-shirt which says “I have been in Russia. There are no bears here”. It's too expensive, though, and the vendor won’t haggle.

2.30pm. We're getting hungry. We want somewhere where we can sit for a while out of the rain, which has nice toilets! There's a Greek place listed in the guide book. A ten minute walk in the rain leaves us thoroughly drenched. The restaurant looks good, and it's not too expensive. It's a big place with five differently-themed rooms, and the Olympics on TV. I have dolmades, halloumi (with grapes with lemon juice and sugar), courgette rissoles. And homemade wine. Fantastic. We sit for ages enjoying pudding, although we only order one by mistake. Iain’s is lovely, whoops. We stay for over an hour and a half. £20 in total, pretty fair.

[Some random public building]

[St. Isaac's Cathedral]

[Peter the Great]

We walk round by St. Isaac’s Cathedral. It's much further from the Hermitage than we thought two weeks ago. The gold dome is huge, and you can see it for miles. We're too achy, tired and wet to go up, we'll do it tomorrow. We walk past it, through a park with weddings and brass bands. Our walk takes us alongside the river, past the Admiralty building. We haven’t yet crossed the river, there’s a lot we haven’t seen in St Petersburg. We've decided not to go to the Kunstkammer, the museum of curiosities which specialises in deformities.

We're miles from the metro station, so we walk back up towards Nevsky Prospekt to get the bus. A nice Russian girl who speaks English tells us what to do. Bus is excruciatingly slow, but at least it's not wet. There's a tremendous amount of traffic through the main road. Metro is much faster but there is no station in the centre. They were going to build a station under cathedral but it's too heavy and might sink.

We discover some Canadians going to our hostel. In their 50s, travelling independently to China by train, which is brave!

We walk the two minutes to the hotel to get bags, and back to the hostel for 7pm. It's the last place we'll have to stay, hurrah.