Migration Control - Welcome to Russia!

Or maybe we can call this post "London Calling"? The Clash, the only band that matters! So I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off today. We have a staff meeting, then there were issues with the mini hotel where I cam officially captian minni. Arrivals for the second session have begun to trickle in but the majority of them will be arriving tomorrow. We will have over 40 people leaving and almost 50 arriving! Yikes! The stellar and free wireless connection at the Mini Hotel has been severed. I don't know why. At first I could reach the router and hack into it and reset it, but the DSL line it was plugged into stopped working. As of yesterday the router was unreachable and we are now in a wasteland of NO INTERNET. It really really really really sucks. The 200 some odd photos I shot of fire dancers by the Dvoretskey Bridge will have to wait until I reach a stable location, like London, and have Wireless or something like it at Erez's flat.

Quick summation as I have more work to do and a few things to take care of before tonight's boat ride and other festivities... I did go on my annual walk to the embankment with Boobar. We were sitting in the office and really feeling a bachic call to drink. He looked at me said "wanna get out of here? I said, sure. I knew the score at that point, we were going to relive our epic stumble from the Cynic bar near St. Isaacs along the embankment to the bridges and back along Nevsky. This time we just left the pub and went stright up Kazanskaya and down Nevsky past the Hermitage where I took a good nightshot of the palace floodlight and over to the embankment where firedancers were performing. After watching the dancers and pretending I was some national geographic photographer on safari we crossed the street and stood waiting for 1:25 AM to strike when the Dvoretsky Bridge would open up allowing larger boats down the Nevya river. A local struck up a conversation with me and told me that in 1989 a girl made the jump across the bridge from the Peter Paul side as it was openning on a motorcycle. It's funy to watch as people run like mad across this very long bridge which literally traps you on one side of the Nevya or the other. The problem is that there's only bridge that stays down because it's high enough above the water to allow ships thorugh, but all the historic bridges are low and as such have to open and that bridge is a haul from the center of town. Men in camoflauge with bright green vests set up road blocks and cars come flying through gaps in the blocks as they avoid the setting up of the block and manage to cross to the side that they need to be on. It's really kind of wild and disordered yet it all works, amazingly, somehow, miraculously, it just works.



Last night was a night of complete tom foolery. I stopped drinking early but my poor room mate continued down the road of destruction. Folks were quite hammered and we managed to usher them into Sukawati, an Indonesian restaurant on Kazanskaya instead of letting them go back to the beer garden or Datcha once the office bar closed. I think the folks working at the restaurant thought we were insane, I wouldn't blame them... not one bit... we were all acting a bit nuts. I had tea and we sat and watched as one table of particularly drunk fools kept challenging us to toast and back and forth. It was fun, mostly, until two women picked a silly arugment fueled by booz and ego and then it no longer was a good time and I wound up leaving with a few others. I finally made it home and to bed around 4:30 in the morning. James stumbled in an hour later and almost repeated the face plant into the door, or was it him just unable to take his pants off again this time? I can't judge, I was in that state once last year... you fall over taking off your pants to go to bed, that's a sure fire sign you should've been in bed before reaching such a plastered state.

The days are now counting down to my departure I'm going to help get this second session under way then mozy on out of here on Tuesday London bound. Sasha has been tossing around the idea to go camping with a few folks on Sunday night, an hour or two outside of the city to a lake she says is quite beautiful. Since I won't be here for Edward's Datcha party at the end of the year, one of the best afternoons I've ever had in this country, I don't think I would mind spending a white night on the bank of a river, so long as it isn't pouring miserably because the weather, although not the record heat wave of last summer that cause most of us to break out in all kinds of nasty rashes and not sleep, walking around like zombies, has been wet as hell and limited the number of decent photos days I have. I leave the camera at home because its raining, walk around, it clears, go home grab gear, then it clouds over and begins to pour arctic rain on us again... so bloody unpredictable...

So that's most of the news that I have for you... guess I'm going to have to watch my ass in London, looks like a car bomb plot was thwarted near picadilly... imagine that, Petersburg has been quietter and calmer than London... insane. Maybe it's because this city is getting so bloody expensive that it's calmed down from the days of the wild west and rampant bribes and coruption. It's still corrupt, but not that corrupt. The migration control thing was odd, some officially decided we weren't paying enough per night at the mini hotel and was going to come and do a migration control check. I had to warn our occupats with a good story that they don't know each other and that this isn't a group buying out the hotel, I don't know why, but that's what had to happe. I had to sneak from room to room, warned by the woman at the desk, who was sitting there with the owner, because the owner speaks english, and this woman at the desk, well she's been nice to me as I speak the lingo and I don't give her grief. She hates Burke though... which cracks me up... oh well... can't win them all.

Police avert car bomb 'carnage'

Police say the area will be closed for some time


Reaction to car bomb
A car bomb planted in central London would have caused "carnage" if it had exploded, police sources have said.
A controlled explosion was carried out on the car, packed with 60 litres of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, in Haymarket, near Piccadilly Circus.

An ambulance crew saw smoke coming from the green metallic Mercedes, near the Tiger Tiger nightclub at 0130 BST.

"International elements" are believed to be involved, Whitehall sources told the BBC.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command, said: "It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been serious injury or loss of life."

The ambulance had been called to the nightclub - where up to 1,700 people were inside - when they spotted smoke, now believed to be vapour, inside the car.

Bomb experts manually disabled the "potentially viable explosive device".

The car bomb has echoes of other terrorist plots. Five men were jailed for life in April for a UK bomb plot linked to al-Qaeda that targeted a shopping centre and a nightclub with a giant fertiliser bomb.

And Dhiren Barot was jailed for life last November for conspiring to park limousines packed with gas canisters underneath high-profile buildings before detonating them.

DAC Clarke told a press conference that it was too early to say who was responsible but the incident "resonated" with previous terrorist plots.

"The threat from terrorism is real. It is here, enduring. Life must go on but we must all stay alert," he said.

Mr Clarke also specifically mentioned nightclubs as a potential target.

Following the discovery, police patrols in central London were stepped up "to provide a visible reassurance", rather than in response to a specific threat.

Officers will visit licensed premises to reiterate ongoing crime prevention and safety advice, said a police spokesman.

The Muslim Council of Britain, the largest organisation representing Muslim groups in the UK, urged people to help the police find the perpetrators.

Secretary-General Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, said: "It is now a duty upon all the rest of us to help the police so that they can bring whoever was involved in this plot swiftly to justice".

On the trail of Raskolnikov

Spark and Dust

1.

to the living and the dead
inevitably dust inevitably
man’s most frightening invention
strikes a devil’s third
withering the land of people
to return the impossible
act of having been alive

2.

to the dead and the living
inevitably collide inevitably
the return is a fiction for its self
and certainty mocks the mirror
to be made in image
disassembled in the course of fire
but still a spark in passing

Switching stones

The switch in stones
stepping into such spaces
is air and the economy of cigarette butts

blue tomorrows carried in a brown paper bag
a left over acidity when a single shot darkened 70 years
we can't be sure but the devil stalks the moscow metro

there's something about the plan
then planned and executed with care for details
derails all other options when this too is uncontrollable

you might say go to the devil
and ask for a blessing to be had for success
this is neither feather nor down

publicly speaking
what if we set this town on fire
it's as much a birth right as it was wrong to be born

silenus ends silence
breeding myths and rivers
best to forget solutions and concentrate on the moment

the question is asking itself an answer
another way to break the surface of it all
and what exists excites and enters the skin to be remembered

The days are bleeding togehter...

I could swear that the days are melting together. The separation between night and day, or more accurately, the lack thereof, makes it impossible to keep time "straight". Time here is not time, I've said that before. JD made an interesting observation at one point, he said that distance is disconcerting in that you can't trust what you see or that you're always surprised by the distance of things because the buildings are so massive and you can't really tell how far something is. The scale of these 19th century giants makes a seemmingly short walk seem like a million miles of unpredictable "ulitzi." This has been a remarekably different trip for me. I'm not sure how to categorize it. I've done nothing cultural, I haven't stepped foot in a single museum. I've been to all the big ones multiple times. I've simply "been" here. Does that make sense? I've spent a bit of time walking around but mostly talking with an international cast of friends who I'm fortunate enough to see once a year in this magical place. I've had some bloody great conversations and enjoyed the company of good people while sleeping in till the afternoon and coming home between 5 and 8 in the morning. Does it seem like I'm throwing this whole trip away? I don't know, maybe, but I think I've been ready for a "vacation", one of those things where you lay your ass down on a sandy beach and spend a week causing the depression of your bum to become a permanent fixture somewhere in the tropics. I haven't had something like that in a long time. I did my exploring while I was in Israel, a madman on the run trying to take in as much ancient history and modern "stuff" as possible. Here I'm just in a state of being. I did some serious drinking over the past week but it's slowed down. We had some binge nights that featured waaaaaaaay too much vodka, beer (not an alcoholic beverage here) and a giant bottle of Johnny Walker Green Label that Tanya brought James and left in our room, so yeah on that front, I've worked my muscle, I mean liver like a hooker in the tenderloin.



Last night was James' birthday, let me rephrase that, last night James and fellow degenerates, including myself, marked his Birthday by collecting ourselves near the Defense of Leningrad museum at a flat inhabited by Ryan and Scott, quasi participants, former alums of the program who are just hanging out in "the burg" and playing Peter Bjorn and John's Young Folks over and over and over again. There were like 5 trips to the market for beer, no matter how many we would buy they seemed to be gone in the space of 30 minutes. 2 bottles of vodka and about 25 liters of beer later we were all quite happy and once again, out of beer. So the decision was made to move the entire crowd to Marstal. Marstal is one of those terrible places that I'd say is a strong argument against capitalism. The place is essentially a brothel that happens to have strippers. 90% of the women in that club are "working girls" and if you have a foreign passport you can get in for free while locals or people carrying a Russian passport pay a cover charge of 50 rubles. We stayed in there for another hour, I sat down feeling no real compunction to dance to terrible Euro Trash techno and guarded our group's things. It really is a terrible place considering that down the street and around the corner is a great new club called Achtung Baby where the music is good (mixing is crap) but the music is danceable, the lights aren't obnoxious and cheaply arranged club strobes, and the space itself is this wonderful high ceilinged brick room. We've gone there a few times for drinks and to cut some rug and it has always been a beautiful time. This is the kind of join that feels unpretentious and the locals get down with the foreigners without trying to take them home for a price. The place really is a melting pot and I dig that about it. I've heard everything from US3 to Sinatra, David Byrne and Oasis in Achtung Baby.

Going back a few days...

We sat around and enjoyed the celebration known as "The Last Bell" where a historic 3 mast schooner is sailed across the Nevya river and the main drag, Nevsky Prospekt is shut down so the throng of recently graduated teenagers and military cadets can get stupidly drunk and break their beer bottles. In past years we would charter a boat and cruise the Nevya but this year we couldn't get a boat and wound up hanging out near the cathedral watching the madness unfold. As the day waned the streets became bloated with people frolicing. I walked out into the middle of the street to shoot some photos of the crowd. I was a little nervous about having my camera out, feeling a little vulnerable, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world to be quite honest. Pictures are now up here.



So this town has become very expensive. 3 years ago I could get a business lunch for 3 dollars, 90 rubles and the excahnge rate was like 33 to the dollar. Now it's 25 and I can't find one for under 250. It's insane! Beers at the beer garden are now over 2 bucks, the store is still cheap, but we used to score them for just over a buck! Everything here has become ridiculous including my favorite Uzbeki place, but I don't care the cost, it's still one of my favorite things. I went to Banya today with a couple guys and it was 360 rubles for 2 hours unlike 300 for the last two years. So this place is changing something fierce... and I'm not sure I like the changes...

There are a few things I'm planning on doing still, there's an exhibit of courtyard photography at a gallery next to Nabokov's house that I'm going to go too, and probablly pop over to Nevsky's Monastary for a little photo shoot of the other graveyards I didn't have enough film for 3 years ago. I want to also finally get inside of the monastery and see Nevsky's grave... there's also the siege museum at Moskovsky Metro Station... so maybe on Thursday... the weather is crap and I'm unmotivated to go anywhere. I've been sitting here in the office bar writing and uploading photos, seems like a successful day for me... the tea is good and I have a fresh pack of smokes, so I'll be here for a bit until it's time to go to Il Patio for James' official birthday. That man hasn't celebrated his birthday in the states for 7 years, not such a bad way to go about it, what do you think?

Hope everyone is well...

All things cultural

I think I've sworn them off... seriously... I'm tired of this cities cultural what nots and I've done very little of it last week. I've been bumming around, reading and sitting in coffee houses having good conversations. There's been a bit of work since Timur, one of our local assistants broke his leg in a scooter accident. This group has been mellow and amazingly enough the cops have been very mellow. The locals have told me that there's been a crack down of sorts on the police. I haven't had a sideways glance from the cops yet. When we did go to Datcha/Fidel's that one night with the nazis dwarf and his amazonian companion, I didn't see but one or two cop cars rolling by the joint, and there was the one parked near the hotel with the two cops that looked to be more asleep than on duty. It's strange I tell you, maybe after that McDonald's was bombed the cops finally realized that there's more to be done in protecting the public good than shaking down tourists for money... then again that's probably just wishful thinking.

So tonight the French group AIR is playing in an outdoor park called Stereoleto. The decision is between this and a group called Pepsi, Russian group, which I've been told is quite good. The other uncertainty is that tonight is "The last bell". Nevsky prospect will be closed this evenning for the mass "march" of cadets and high school graduates up and down the street. There will be lots of broken glass, lots of singing, lots of pubescent hormones ragining, fireworks, red sails and other nutiness ALL NIGHT LONG. Kind of one of those magical nights really... I just wish there was a high up perch from which I could photograph this stupidity rather than from the thick of the crowd. No matter where we go, we will ultimately run into this bunch of crazed young lunatics.

We did a boat ride the other night, it was the night before the solstice. Parker mixed up the dates of the actual solstice, bbut technically we were on the water when the solstice happened, or started, something like that, it was a Solstice boat ride god damn it. One of the whitest nights i can remember, really marvelous. New touches have been added to the Peter Paul fortress, they've put lights along the walls that transition in rainbow colors... PRIDE? Not likely... but it's nice to think that this city might some day develop an open mind. The fountains in the middle of Nevsky were booming and booming, it was great.... just great... lots of beer, cuban cigars and more beer...

Oh I did have my grudge match with Igor, it was a Tie, no winners no losers. The bastard was cheating like a bastard! I mean really cheating, he was twisting that wrist, I think he knows that I'm the superior male and will destroy him this year... we're going to go at it once more I'm sure, most upsetting his less than noble/honorable approach to our annual grudge match.

Mmonday I'm heading to Nevsky's Monastary and maybe the Nicholevsky church on Fontanka to see if they rebuilt it. Tomorrow is a farewell dinner for Jenya who will be taking the morning train back to Moscow. I'm off to have breakfast wiith the Gusev sisters at Zoom. At the moment all my compatriots and cohorts are having a board meeting at The Office and my cell phone hasn't once rang, so this is a good thing... maybe I'll go sneak around the city. I've already been to the camera shop, no cheap wide angle lenses... *sigh* I've been completely anti shopping, even the idea of goingg and buying liters of vodka seems like too much effort... I've just been sitting a bit... strangne times I tell you friends, strange times indeed....

Shislivo..

Status Report Spock

Not too shabby, not too great. That massive blister that always seems to find me has found me and taken root on the right side of my foot. I've started my diet of mole skin and oxygen which helps the sucker harden and then fall off as quickly as humanly possible. My throat however is wrecked. I've been smoking so much I'm loosing my voice. I know, just what you wanted to hear, right mom? Well that's the sad fact of what's happening... I'm trying to slow down a bit, but well, it's Russia... it's healthier to breathe smoke than it is the air!!

Speaking of Air, did I mention they're playing on Saturday in the park known as Stereo Letto? There's a possible trip to see them, other plans include a group called Pepsicola that I've never heard off but have been told are quite good, so we'll see. Found out that Aerosmith is coming later in the month, but I won't be here to enjoy them. Oh well. Tonight or tomorrow night there's going to be a huge concert in the plaza outside the Hermitage, BONY M is doing a 30th anniversary concert. I saw the stage that was being built as I was walking around yesterday....

I've been to a couple readings... quick run down of things in that dept:

Fannny Howe: pretty great reading, I mean she's a very well known poet and as Jeff said in his intro, had this reading taken place in NYC there would've been a charge for tickets at the door. Fanny's work is one of quiet, it bespeaks an understated silence. The new work that she read from had an element of the pastoral which I don't normally like but I found extremely refreshing as I sat in the Mayakovsky surrounded by the enormous buildings of the anti-pastoral. I kind of wanted to talk to her abobut Tis of Thee, an earlier work, but she seems very shy and when I shook her hand and gave her greetings from the bay area, she somewhat shrank away in a reclusive state of writerly shyness.

Gary Shteyngert on the other hand is a madman, he's like Phillip Roth on steroids. His work isn't quietly humorous, it's loud and in your face nuttiness.

George Elliot Clarke: what can I say about this one, I wasn't crazy about his work. He read too long, the material just wasn't interesting, and he keeps winning awards, is he the sole Black voice in Canada? I can only take so much rhyme and rhythm and verbal dance that meanders to a message that isn't at all new, or interesting, or even merritous. part of the work smacks of showmanship and the whole event was more spectacle than reading. I've never been told "to thank you I want to read 3 more poems" smells of a kind of narcissism to me. The occasional bits of humor in what he read were refreshing, but it didn't make up for a constant and seemingly unmeasured verbal assault. This kind of linguistic orouborous gets very old very quickly.

more later....

The neo-nazis midget and the amazonian hooker

I don't think I mentioned this in my previous post, but there was the incident of the neo-nazis midget pimp and the amazonian hooker... so before I left for St. Pete's I began to correspond with a guy named Jenya who was a friend of Jenya's (Mariya's sister) that she met online. This Jenya was her male doppleganger as he too was born in St. Petersburg and was returning there for the first time in 15 years. She suggested he contact me for some Visa troubles so I could give him some advice on places and ways to deal with the Consulate. Anyway, the three of us all met up one night, this was the night of the bar fight described in the previous post... and after the bar fight ended the night at the office pub early we few, we happy few and too awake and slightly intoxicated few, who don't sleep a wink in this town, decided it was time to go dance. Now that I look back on it, it was just us Russians, the participants went to bed and we quietly slithered to that corner of the city where we tell them never to go. instead of the usual, Datcha, we went to Fidel's. Fidel's is the new bar openned just a year ago by the former half owner of Datcha, to compete with that bar. Normally it's a mellow place, from previous experience, but tonight the people there were in rare rare form.

As we made our way through the crowd and to the back dance floor we came upon a sight stranger than anything I could remember. There was a very short bald headed guy, hard to make out his sleaves of tats but they looked to be of the I've been around the block variety. He maybe came up to my shoulder and wasn't what I would call a handsome lad at all. He sat at the counter along the wall with his back to it. Leaning into him and making out with him was a 6'3" Amazon wearing a g-string and a PVC jacket. Her legs were painted with strange animal designs and other sundry patterns. He barely made her shoulder. They stood around the dance floor as he would get off on how people stared at her. I couldn't decide if he was pimping her out or just insane, but in either case, it was, um... well, bizarre. The night ended well enough and we all got the dancing shtick out of our system and then went back to our respective hotels to retire... but I'm telling you dear and gentle readers, this town is getting really strange!

The boat ride was awesome, happily, it stopped raining just as we stepped out of the hotel to make our way for the Moyka 43 landing. the sad part was that I didn't take my camera because it was raining cats and dogs... this is a strange and funny place...

pozhe...

Broken Locks, Bar Fights and Hijacking Internet... this is Russia!

Well, this won't be terribly long, not that anyone wants to listen to my drunken ramblings anyway? Wait? Did I say drunken? No, not quite yet, but it's in the mail for sure. Tonight is our first boat ride and as I've said in the past, it's one of my absolute favorite things to do in this city. I'm not sure if Igor will be on the boat, he already felt my biceps to see if I was lifting waits during the year in hopes of toppling the mighty Russian, little does he know of my climbing endeavors. Then again, he's younger and quicker, bastards... "starast ne radast" as the saying goes in Russia.

So I'm not going to sit here and type out quite everything that has transpired since my less than glorious arrival to St. Petersburg through Munich after missing my connection in London. Let's just say it was a bloody long trip, however, this was the easiest time ever dealing with passport control, and cutest I might add. She just stamped my migration form and passport and sent me on my way, done. The trouble began then. Did I say trouble?

My luggage arrived almost 3 days after I did. I did laundry in the shower while I washed the grime from a full day of travel then hung my quick drying REI shirt to demoisten in the breaze of white nights. We've had a good day here, maybe two, there was some wind and today it's been raining most of the day. The weather is supposed to be wet on and off all week. This means two things: 1) less opportunity for pictures and an absolute necessity for the banya 2) when there is an opportunity, with the way that the wind blows these arctic storms around, there should be some really dramatic cloud scapes for some nice HDR stuff... wooo hooo...

Sergei, remember him? My young driver with the fantastic stories, the Mario Andretski of ST. Pete's is off to do some kind of military training. He actually told Katia he wanted to go on a tour around St. Pete's with me again, I would've happily paid him double this time and spent a couple more hours driving around with him. He's a totally sweet kid, he'll be back on the weekend, I might hit him up this coming weekend or maybe the weekend before I leave for a little bit of his time... hopefully the weather will cooperate.

So let me see, in summation, it's been rough, a couple 5 am kind of nights filled with friends I've missed terribly over the year, some really good conversations, catching up with Olmstead who I haven't seen since my 1st year here as a student, late nights/early mornings in the beer garden, a bottle of whiskey while waiting for lock smiths to break into my room as the lock in my door at the hostel stopped working. I tell you, it was ironic that just after I get my suitcase, change, spend less than 12 hours with the joy of clean clothing and stuff, I get locked out the minute that Boobar arrives and I'm taking him to our den of iniquity that we've inhabited for the past 2 years. JD is staying here in the mini hotel with me, it's really great to have a friend here from the bay area, just a nice touch from home. Poor guy isn't able to withdraw cash from his ATM his credit union says no dice in Russia, so he's been taking out a marker from the bank of len.

Yes, so last night there was a bar fight, not clear on the details, someone spilled a beer and one of our folks got punched. First time in the history of SLS, 9 years strong that it happened. An open fight in a bar can happen in any country, I suppose this might color your opinion of the locals, but let's face it, I don't care if you're from tibet or from timbuktu, drunk is drunk is drunk. It was resolved quickly and we ushered our guy to the hotel and I was able to rustle up a bag of ice to replace the ice cream msandwhiches that were applied to his very bloody nose which left a clear trail for me to follow through the inn to his room on the 4th floor. Poor sod...

Alright, the combination of Indonesian food, vodka and beer made me sleepy and I lay down for a spell but I just stared at the ceiling thinking if I fall asleep I will completely miss the boat and or feel like crap from when I wake up to catch the boat... so with that, I'm waiting for the camera battery to charge and then I'm off to the store for bottles and bottles of beer for the boat to go with the cuban cigars that Tom is bringing... STOGIES!

Shislivo vsem... more very soon now that I've hijacked another working internet connection that's fast enough to post pictures on... go check em out.

It started like a three hour cruise...

I'm not quite in St. Petersburg, I'm most of the way there, but not quite there. It all went awry in New York. The flight to London was delayed by 2 hours. I knew then that I'd miss my connection in Heathrow to St. Petersburg but I had no clue that it would add a fourth flight for me to get to Russia. I'm now in my 4th airport in less than a day drinking a half liter of Weissbier (have you guessed where I am?) viva la Munich Deutschland. The lounge here is quite lovely and the music and natural light that fills this seemingly endlass expanse of glass and polished steel is quite lovely. Had I more energy I'd definately photograph it but breaking out the camera gear is more effort than I have energy for. I've been nodding off in strange places, but we don't have long to go now, not long at all, just another 3 bloody hours! I've no clue if my luggage will be getting off the plane with me in St. Petersburg, I really hope it does, I could use a fresh change of clothing and oh how lovely does a bar of soap sound? I'm due to arrive in St. Petersburg at 12:40 in the morning, so it should still be light out, *snicker snicker*. My rusty German has come in handy here, I remebered how to say, entschuldigung, wie spate ist es? Which got me the time, and a few other words and decoded bits of conversation. This is one of two accomplishments thus far. I'm bumed, I should be just finishing dinner at Suliko and sucking down shots of vodka or maybe just a few beers under the arms of Katuzov near Kazanskay Cabor, but alas, I'm in Munich. To be perfectly honest I'm half tempted to just go through customms and explore. The weather is brilliant here, warm and lovely and I could use a hotel bed. I've a feeling I'm going to be sleeping on the couch in the office tonight as we won't be able to assume ownership of the mini hotel until Friday night or Saturday morning. No rest for the wicked I guess. Zach and Beth, if you're reading this, your vodaphone sim card saved me! When I arrived in London I quickly switched out sims to my megaphone and found there was no signal, big surprise, then I swtiched to Vodaphone and saw mega bars. There was exactly 1 penny on the card so I topped it off at the Vodaphone counter in Heathrow and began to scrible numbers out of my phone on my palm with appropriate country dialing codes of folks in St. Pete's. I managed to get a hold of Katia: who took down my flight number and said she'd make sure someone would meet me. I saved her or whoever was going to be waiting for my non arriving ass at the airport a trip to Pulkova, there'll be plenty of that over the next few days. Right, so that's where things stand now... The master plan is still in full effect, meat on a stick and white nights, it just had to wait nearly six hours and a few stops... bloody hell... I've been the geriatric crusader since I landed in NYC. I've been helping old people get their luggage off of moving belts and just before I deplaned in Munich I had to help an elderly woman undo her seat buckle. She was very sweet, telling me about going to Bavaria where she lives. She said she doesn't like cities, the air is cleaner where she is and it suits her pace of life. I think I would very much like to see where she lives, like right now, I'm sure there's excellent beer and a soft feather bed that smells of light starch and cedar if not birch. Then again, I'm only 3 hour flight from a really hot sauna and all the birch that my tuchus can tolerate. Other strange folks encountered on my sojourn thus far, I sat next to a girl over the Atlantic who was coming home to the UK after traveling for 4 1/2 months through Japan, Australia, Fiji and New York. She said she was bummed as she would have to find a job, but only for a few months as she was going back to the university. I was jealous. Then there was the south african Indian chap I had a smoke with in London who had been to SF and talked about our sourdough bread bowels filled with clam chowder. Sounds like he got a good dose of fisherman's wharf. Then there were the two German chaps that I met here in Munich who were also heading for this massive Terminal 2 to catch a connection to Munster. We found the gate to the bus stop and we were the ONLY people there, it was very strange, they said they had never seen it so abandoned. We all laughed when the bus driver finally opened a door and called for us to come out. I tell you I feel lost on the road without a watch. I know I'm in Germany where all the clocks run perfectly but my cell phone is kaput here and I'm timeless... I've been popping into Duty free shops in 3 countries looking for a resonably priced time piece, but alas, nothing that I like under 1300 quid. There were a couple nice cell phones in the UK that caught my eye, but that's as far as I went with that. Kris if you're reading this, Observatory Mansions is quite good, I'm totally digging it, it reads a bit like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film plays, odd and slightly uncomfortable. The illustrations remind me of Edward Gorey, connection? The author's name is Edward Carey... who knows... or maybe like the Ralph Steadman illustrations in Fear & Loathing, just less ink splatters. Ah the beer is helping, a lot, beer, helping perpetuate the human race since the garden of eden and all that begetting and begatting. Oh one more odd duck that I rubbed elbows with: when I got off the plane in Heathrow I had to find the "connections" desk to figure out my future. A Russian woman was behind me and she kept inching up. Everytime I leaned against the snaking rail that guided the line she crept up to be nearly equal with me. I waited for her to try and pull a NASCAR like drafting move on me, at which point I would've unloaded as I was in no mood to be trifled with or surrender my position in line. I swung my backpack to which is strapped my tripod in her general direction a couple times like a stegasaurus warning her that there be spikes in this hump, and she finally got he message. This Soviet pushiness would not be tolerated, well I'm heading for a right fill of that Soviet rudeness, it's in my future, can't say I'm sad about it, but it one always needs a small does of it to remind one that this isn't Kansas anymore. The music in this airport is quite good... I'm digging it... Right, time to hit the WC and then find a squat by the gate. I'll bbe in touch soon... take care and auf wiedersehen.

Just hours now... Shislivo vsem!

Can't sleep

Thinking to much about where I'm heading in a mear 54 hours...