St. Petersburg, Russia

Rachel Polonsky, winner of the 2011 Dolman Travel Book of the Year, "remembers living through the final Soviet winter of 1990 in St. Petersburg -- then Leningrad -- and feeling the world turn upside down."

The bride was English, a former student of mine, but she posed for photographs like an archetypal Petersburg beauty at the foot of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great. It was the midsummer season of white nights, when the sun never fully sets, and we stayed at the wedding party till morning, wandering along the Moika embankment for breakfast at the Hotel Angleterre.

It was all so different from when my husband Marc and I had lived here 15 years before....