Well, it's another damp day in St Petersburg. Rather like yesterday, in fact - frustrating when you're only in a place for three days!
I will post pictures soon, but right now all we have here is the pastel confections of St Petersburg under threateningly dark skies, while we scurry from one tourist must-do to another! I was in St Petersburg about... ten years ago, and my abiding memory of that time was the difficulty of finding anything which resembled a modern, western shop. Looking back, we must have wandered up and down Nevskt Prospekt, St p's main commercial sreet, without even realizing it was anything more than a residential backstreet! No fear of that today - it's Oxford Street ransplanted, heaving with people and neon and global brands. But over it all still broods the original baroque buildings, and even the glamour of modern marketing can't quite shake the impression that modern St Petersburg is shoehorned in, that it is trying to find the cracks in Peter the Great's diktat. Perhaps as a result, the place has the feeling of make-do and mend. Here and there are signs of it - the Russian Mint being run out of the incongruously candy-coloured confections of the Peter and Paul Fortress... a decidedly aged antenna strung up over a baroque spire on Nevsky Prospekt... the glitter of the west, thrown over a dustsheet of poverty, covering the original, brutishly-powerful nouveau-riche power-architecture of Imperial Russia...
Okay, enough nonsense. There's a girl in a hotel room waiting for me to get back so we can go eat!
