Message in a bottle found after 10 years in Russia

May 26 (UPI) -- A Polish woman who threw a message in a bottle into the Gulf of Finland during a trip to Russia received a reply saying the bottle had been found 10 years later.

Natalia Kunowska said she was a student at Krakow's AGH University of Science and Technology in 2011 when she visited St. Petersburg as part of an international student exchange.

"I was with my friend at the beach and we came up with the idea to write a letter and throw it into the water," Kunowska recalled in a Facebook post.

Kunowska said she put her contact information and a 10-ruble note in the bottle in hopes of hearing from a finder in the future.

She said she finally heard last week from a man named Maksim who reported he had found the bottle near where it had been launched a decade earlier.

"I just got a message with a picture of a bottle and a question asking if I recognized it. I was really shocked," Kunowska said.

Kunowska said she found out Maksim is an ecologist and she apologized to him for littering.

"But fortunately he didn't mind," she wrote.