Hello, I’m Lilya Karpova (@ribka_karpova), I’m 38, I’m a video maker from Moscow, a blogger and a mother of three boys.
Well, our mini-trip to Vyborg has ended. And you know what I most want to share with you? My conviction that in life you need to do spontaneous things: if you wanted, you did. If you liked an expensive thing, you took it and bought it, you feel the need for new emotions and impressions, you bought a ticket and now you’re in another city. Because life is beautiful because at any moment you can do as you want, and this life happens now, not tomorrow. Recently, I also spontaneously decided to take part in the “Kudablin” project from OneTwoTrip, and everything happened.
You don’t always have to wait for the right time of year, vacation, or some other ideal moment. You just need to take a small but decisive step. Even traveling around your own country brings a lot of impressions and endorphins, just like traveling abroad, believe me. How huge and diverse our country is, it’s very interesting to visit every corner of it!
Vyborg in February turned out to be completely different from St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, as I expected. Narrow cobbled streets, stunning architecture, incredible forest in the Park Monrepos museum-reserve on the Baltic coast, where it is serene at any time of the year or day. The city is very small (with a population of just over 70 thousand people), you can literally walk around it in half a day, which is ideal for us as tourists!
Waking up in the morning, we decided to start exploring the city from the Vyborg Castle. Even though it is under reconstruction and we were not able to get inside, on its territory we felt like we were in the Middle Ages. The tall St. Olaf’s Tower is visible from almost everywhere. Then we went to the city and walked along its authentic streets. What immediately caught my eye was that the roads and sidewalks were not sprinkled with reagents at all, and everything was covered in snow.
Walking around the city, I enjoyed how harmoniously and beautifully people here decorated their homes. It was especially wonderful that the day turned out to be warm and sunny.
In Vyborg, I completed a task that was voted for by my subscribers. It was necessary to shoot a video for TikTok near the Witch House. I came across a viral trend where bloggers slowly move their hips to weird and catchy music, but I decided to go ahead and dance like this at almost every place we visited. It turned out very funny.
We drank coffee and sweets in a cafe, bought some “sanctions” at the local market and got to Mon Repos Park… I now have an obsessive desire to see it again, but in the summer. I have never seen such diverse forest nature. The smell and silence of the winter forest and the views of the bay are very beautiful!
A table was reserved for the evening at the famous “Tavern”, where my husband and I ate in an authentic setting. The dishes are hearty, tasty and large, prices are low relative to Moscow.
Fed and satisfied, we headed towards the Alvar Aalto library, taking photos along the way near the yellow “tram” and the moose statue. Tired of emotions and the 20,000 steps we had walked, we plopped down and fell asleep in our cozy room in Victoria.
In general, a real mini-trip, but a full-fledged reboot! And all you needed was to spontaneously write OneTwoTrip – and now you’re already racing on the Sapsan to St. Petersburg, and from St. Petersburg it’s only an hour on the Lastochka to Vyborg.
