in the Soviet Union. He visits Estonians who sing a song, dreaming of the day when Estonia would again be an independent country. Then Palin catches a train headed for Leningrad. Russian Steps In Leningrad, Palin meets up with a Vladimir Lenin impersonator, who gives him a tour of the city. He witnesses a Russian Orthodox baptism ceremony, and almost gets baptised himself. He visits the cemetery where the likes of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are buried, then has the honour of firing the midday gun at the Peter and Paul Fortress. After buying some pears at a local market he experiences the difficulty of trying to buy a bottle of vodka in a supermarket which is "uncontaminated by food", a reference to Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch. In Novgorod, he meets a director who casts him in a film. Then he is invited to a dinner party, eating freshly caught crayfish and drinking 23 toasts with homemade vodka. After participating in a ceremony on behalf of the sister city of Watford (portrayed as a dream) he visits the town of Chernobyl, Ukraine, scene of the 1986 nuclear disaster. He then travels to Kyiv and Odessa, where he is wrapped in sulphurous, black mud. At the harbour in Odessa he descends the stairs shown in the film Battleship Potemkin, then boards a ferry and sails across the Black Sea. While on the ferry, Palin learns of the coup that attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, which leads to the collapse of the Soviet Union a few months later. Mediterranean Maze Arriving by ferry to Istanbul, Turkey, Palin stays at the Pera Palas, where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express and experiences a turkish bath, getting the full treatment from a large, mostly silent staff member. He checks out a local bazaar, as well as a procession at Topkapi Palace. He then takes a train through western Turkey to Marmaris and catches ferries to first Rhodes, Greece then to Cyprus. Palin then visits the British military base at Akrotiri and attends a huge Cypriot wedding. From Limassol, Palin heads for North Africa, his home for the next few months. His first stop is Port Said, Egypt, where the filming crew temporarily loses a tripod and has delays with Customs there. Then he crosses paths with his location in Around the World in 80 Days in Cairo, from where he