Forget French, Russian is the language of love (Anna Parkin, The Guardian)

After meeting her French fiance during her degree year abroad, Anna Parkin decided to learn Russian for their honeymoon in St Petersburg.

From Russia, with love. Anna Parkin is learning Russian via Skype for her honeymoon in Russia. Photograph: Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis.

It was in the third year of my French degree, while I was living in Bordeaux, that French lived up to its romantic designation. I’d been in the city for just five days when I found myself at a house party, hosted by my now-fiance Christophe. I was the one speaking French with a heavy English accent. He was doing the opposite. We decided to meet up the following week for a “conversation exchange”, and it was then we discovered a shared desire to travel the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.