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".
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