71 days

Liverpool

1) I can read all the advertising messages around me.

2) I can speak idiomatically to people in shops and express complex meanings.

3) I can actually understand what people in shops shooting the breeze are saying to each other.

3a) This is only true about half the time—walking around I often fall into the now-familiar feeling that I’m surrounded by a steady murmur of a foreign language, until I remember that what people speak here is ostensibly English and with some concentration I should be able to make it out.

4) It’s easier than I thought it would be to slip back into science mode, although I can feel that background stress field I usually walk around in coming right back with it. Food for thought.

5) The 20p coin is heptagonal. I had forgotten.

well, that was exciting

To tell the story in time sequence, as opposed to the way I figured it out this morning: last night around 4 am, the two French brothers who are staying in my hostel room met a couple of cool guys on a corner nearby, went to get some beers from the 24-hour minimart, the cool guys slipped something in their beer, and they all came back up to the hostel room where the cool guys proceeded to steal the brothers’ backpacks and my daypack. Luckily there wasn’t much left in my daypack (sometimes apparently it’s good to have your stuff strewn all over in a hostel, instead of packed up tidily…)—I just lost my sunglasses, spare camera battery, some groceries, and—of course—my travel journal. I’m sure it’ll fetch a good price on the black market. Ah, St. Petersburg, just when I was starting to think that crime-ridden 21st-century Russia was a myth….

more from St. Petersburg

Very good city for touristing, St Petersburg. Day before yesterday I walked down Nevsky Prospekt, across some bridges, out to the fort where Peter the Great founded the city (I think the whole city is built on reclaimed land, like the Netherlands or Venice—old maps show just a fort in the middle of a river delta), and back again. There were assorted cathedrals along the way: one a 19th century revivalist wonder with checkerboard onion domes and huge expanses of gold mosaic, and huge expanses of tour groups but a sense of holiness nonetheless, another grand with roman colonades on the outside but really populist and devotional on the inside—old women in front of candles in front of dim icons, a priest intoning over the heads of the crowd, a little girl lifted up by her mom so she could kiss an icon properly, spike-heeled, miniskirted St Petersburg fashionistas tying matronly head scarves on before entering and crossing themselves on the way in and the way out—and the last the over-the-top burial place of the tsars and tsarinas, so crowded with huge marble tombs inside that Jesus probably has to stand in the coat closet. And yesterday I spent all day at the Hermitage and ate beet salad with herring. I’m staying at the Puppet Hostel, which used to be the dormitories of the grand puppet theater next door, and the hostel gives out discount tickets to said puppet theater—but their season hasn’t started yet. Oh well. It’s been chilly and slightly rainy—good preparation for Svalbard, where I’m going to land after three plane flights around midnight tonight. Which reminds me, I really should check the weather there.

St Petersburg

Here are some things I like about St Petersburg, from my first four hours here. * smoked and cured fish in many forms. * lots of people doing lots of things on the street, kind of a New York feeling: in one metro station, each train doorway had its own little alcove cut into the red tile and each one had two or three people chatting, or trading shopping bags, or sketching in sketchpads, or standing around with stony expressions and short haircuts looking like they had methods for extracting the missile launch codes from you. * There was a boy in the back room of the convenience store I bought some water in with a black toy poodle on a leash. * Monumental (but delicate) building fronts on monumental avenues. * I’m carrying _rubles_, just like in stories. There seem to be 100 kopecks in a ruble. * I got off the metro at Dostoyevsky Station. * It’s fun walking down the street trying to pronounce all the cyrillic (for practice) under my breath. * When it’s raining a little and twilight is falling at 10 pm, the temperature is completely perfect.

photos

new photos on flickr up through Istanbul, if you haven’t looked recently….

onward from İstanbul

I had a good relaxing time in İstanbul. I saw beautiful mosques on a
spectrum from tourist-centric to tourists-can’t-find-the-door. I sat
in cafes along with backgammon-playing locals. Last night I saw a
sema, a whırling dervish performance, which may not have lifted me up
three successively higher levels of annihilation of the ego and then
back down to a sense of submission to God’s purposes, but was really
cool anyway. Once they got going, theır skirts had standıng waves and
even breaking waves in them. Now I’m off to St Petersburg, where I
think it’s probably 20-30 degrees cooler. No time to write more—have
to figure out how to get to möy hostel once I arrive….

halfway point

Today is the middle day of my trip. It’s hard to summarize what I think about that.