Can you believe it! I'm actually writing you about what's going on without waiting a month! St. Petersburg is a vibrant and beautiful city and reminds me of Paris with its top floor removed. In my somewhat dim recollection, the whole of Paris seems to be somewhere between 4 and 5 stories tall with nearly all interruptions being huge ornate palaces and monuments. The Russians seem to have copied this general scheme from the French, differing from it by removing the top floor from all general buildings and adding the leftover materials and effort to their even more grandiose palaces and monuments. Sitting along all spines of the Neva's delta fan, the Hermitage, Admiralty, Peter and Paul fortress, Stock Trade, and all the various multi-colored and much adorned buildings speak of loudly of opulence though hundreds of years past completion. Karen had visited Russia before Perestroika and in our conversations she had wondered what I would do here. Comparing notes its easy to see that massive changes are under way, though the city strains against them in an architectural sense. Before Gorbachev yielded to Yeltsin (both equally despised here, Gorbachev for failing the Union and Yeltsin for being a drunken dufus) there was no private enterprise, no private hotels, and certainly very few and perhaps no good restaurants. Now every street corner buzzes with magazine's, discount centers, produkti's, supermarkets, cafes, and restaurants. Kiosks surround every metro station and tourist attraction. The owners of the stores drive Chrysler's, BMW's, and Mercedes' through vast gaggles of fume belching soviet era clunkers. The goverment, with it's Ohio sized budget, isn't well enough manned to collect tax revenue so business zooms ahead, growing until caught. There are very few if any police and I simply cannot imagine! there being an effective local zoning authority (in part because there's at least one cafe tent leaning against every single important public building in the city). In short, and for better or worse, the city is undergoing an economic renaissance. I spoke of architectural strain. Downtown is like Paris in that it is comprised of closely packed buildings conducive to first floor transformation into shops and restaurants. The Soviet era suburbs are another story entirely. Blocks are kilometers long. Some of the apartment buildings are nearly that long themselves. Every buildings' architecture quite plainly says, "I am bigger than you. I am a more productive comrad than you are. I'm a bigger cog in the Soviet machine." It's not surprising that these developments look alot like the beltway suburban developments in the US, where human space was interpreted as lightly landscaped plots fronting gargantuan vertically stacked clusters of people receptacles. In Washington, DC, the town with which of course I am now most familiar, one sees these buildings in Ballston, Shady Grove, and on upper Georgia Avenue (those being in decline similar to those I observed in St. Petersburg's suburbs). It is highly interesting to me! that the products of our two great societies (the Russian's and ours) near the time of economic conflagration and the US "winning" the cold war are so eerily similar. I could plop a Dorothy from Kansas onto NW Georgia Avenue in Maryland one hour and St. Petersburg another and she would be hard pressed to accurately guess whether she were hither or thither. Design for human living space (and by that I mean more than where in your living room to place your couch) based entirely on efficiency will fail due to its necessary but dooming neglect of aesthetic. I have been eating well, with no chance of starving or being poisoned to death as was liked to occur in Egypt. I am staying in a Russian home and have been treated to home cooked breakfasts and dinners each day. I have had to, in recourse, stop eating lunch to remotely approach maintaining my figure, but the experience is worth a few extra pounds. Russians eat like we do. There are Chinese, Japanese, American, Italian, and French restaurants around. Like anywhere cosmopolitan it's been nearly impossible to find a restaurant that serves the local fare. It's needless to point this out but I will anyway: Russians, like most people, don't want to eat the same food they eat at home when they go out. Regardless, the food I've been served in this home has been appropriately rustic and simple. There is a strong emphasis on potatoes and bread, both being served in abundance at every meal. The winter here is long and harsh to fat reserves and meals high in starch are quite ne! cessary, if not entirely desireable for a traveling, spoiled American. The best meal so far by far was called Plouff, consisting of grated carrots, onions, rice, and egg all cooked together in what resulted to be roughly a loose casserole. I think I spat out a bay leaf or two while eating a heaping mound so keep that in mind if you're planning some experimental cooking. Lastly, and perhaps most interesting, I helped my hostess configure a computer and fax machine in her living room. She is 74 years old yet managed to string 25 ft. of telephone cable from a central switch into the living room where I sit typing now. Things are very much the same here so it was no problem for me to dissect a power cable, rewire an outlet box, patch together the phone system, and get the whole thing running in a couple hours. Although she doesn't yet have an internet dial-up account she's ready for it when it comes. I'm off to Moscow on the midnight train this evening. I understand that it will be quite different there, though perhaps not so much to my liking. And I will certainly miss my hostess as she's been absolutely fantastic. I hope you continue to do well and that I get to hear from you.