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.
