Things I've learned whilst travelling in Greece this week...

I've never seen sea as blue.

It may be Greece, but that beautiful blue sea is too cold to swim in, in April.

What your children will remember about a stay in a swanky hotel is not the ridiculously huge marble bath they swam in, or the wonderful sea views they could look at whilst they did so, but the single ant they encountered whilst in it.

Said Ant is what will make it into their holiday diaries; not the classical ruins, the amazing hospitality, the wonderful seafood, but the ruddy Ant.

The food is delicious.

The food is not low-fat.

Vegetables?  What are these 'vegetables' you speak of?

Your sons will love the fact that vegetables are in scarce evidence and paint you as the World's Worst Mum when you announce that there will be no pasta or burgers arriving at the table until the plate of grilled veggies in front of them has been consumed.

Some hotels still have the nerve to charge for in-room wi-fi access (hence the lack of posts this week).

When being shown around a city by a local, it always helps to be ridiculously specific about your preferred hit-list of tourist sites.  Otherwise you will find at the end of the day that you may have visited the Acropolis Museum in Athens, you may have had lunch in a restaurant with stunning views of the Acropolis, you may have been in a horse-drawn carriage trip along-side the Acropolis, and you may have walked through a market with the Acropolis as the backdrop, but you will not - despite having repeatedly mentioned your long-lived ambition to visit the Acropolis, since having been a small girl in fact - have actually visited the Acropolis itself.

Who said visitors go off in 3 days?

My parents are visiting us here in Moscow at the moment.

There's nothing like showing people around to reinvigorate your interest in the place that you live, don't you agree?  Since they arrived on Saturday, we have visited the Moscow Botanical Gardens, seen the ecto-plane and submarine berthed not far from where we live, and taken a stroll down the Old Arbat (once upon a time the hangout for the artistic community of Moscow, now a somewhat less glamorous strip of souvenir and coffee shops).  We've taken them to a friends for dinner where they were royally entertained, showed them around the Boys' school, and my father has made a new - Russian - friend who this morning took him to an abandoned airfield to see old helicopters and dead airplanes in their final place of rest before they are retired to the scrapyard.

We've made plans to see the 9th May parade tomorrow, will throw in couple of art galleries, a walk through Gorky Park, some listening to nightingales, and a train ride or two to entertain the anoraks in the family (I'm looking at YOU, Boy #2 and Dad), and before we know it, it will - much to our dismay - be time for them to leave again.

At which point, I imagine they will be delighted to get home again, for a bit of a rest...

The one where I get mistaken for security...

I think that perhaps I should be quite offended.

Today, I took a formal guided tour around The Moscow Kremlin for the first time. (I say 'The Moscow Kremlin' because most old Russian cities - and indeed, many cities outside Russia proper - have their own 'Kremlin', as the actual word means 'fortress'; not something you might be aware of if you've never visited here).

It was fascinating, and I'm very glad I did it. Shame it was ruddy freezing and that it's taken me nearly two years of living here to get round to it, but there you go...

Anyway. The moment that caused offence. To enter the Kremlin one has - of course - to go through a security gate manned by armed soldiers. You step through the metal detector, submit your bag for a cursory search and that's it, job done. At least - job done for the four ladies I was on the tour with.

However, after I had gone through the standard procedure, the soldier pulled me to one side and mumbled something in Russian. I couldn't hear it properly so asked him to repeat it - and then I still couldn't understand it. At this stage, he realised I spoke English and asked me very matter-of-factly if I had any guns in my bag.

Guns? In my bag?

Well, I laughed and said no, of course not. But when I discovered that none of my friends had been asked the same question (we were clearly part of the same group), it all became horribly clear.

The soldier thought I was their body-guard.

I guess you can't blame the poor man; two of my friends were tricked out in expensive fur coats, whilst the other two were looking significantly more designer-clad than dressed-for-warmth North-Face branded me, but still. A body guard? I mean, I knew my hat was bad, but really...