a few more observations (okay, it does go on a bit, but this is for me, too)

I'm not sure if it's the packs of howling and snarling dogs wandering the night streets, or the raging fires in the garbage bins, or the men in dark suits and glasses that were taking my picture in the restaurant yesterday at lunch time, or the pools of coagulated blood on the sidewalks and doorsteps that I must step around in the mornings on my way to breakfast, but there is something about Petersburg that is, well, different from my little house on that pacific island.

How quiet Vancouver Island is. How quaint. How safe. How calm. Yesterday, while I sat in the "park" across from the Kazanski cathedral to eat my breakfast of yogurt and apple/cherry tart, and while I took in the fact that I was sharing the space with those who had not yet awakened from their nights' sleep on the benches around me, several piles of relatively fresh dog shit, the remains of a whole chicken, and a dead rat, I realized that of the many things I could possibly be missing (Steve, Judith, Larissa, Lorraine, Zoa, Brendan, a hot shower, a good meal, a comfortable bed, fresh air, a mosquito free existence, hugs, Milton, the cats, Steve, Steve, Steve, and Steve...and then my colleagues and the familiarity that comes along with them), I am missing nature. Here, in the heart of Petersburg, there is no nature. Well, none other than the above mentioned park (and others in similar vein, and all surrounded by cement and pastel coloured European facaded buildings) and the rivers running through the river. But the rivers too are bound by concrete and although I have seen men standing on bridges to reel a hook from a line in hopes of catching a fish, my imagination does not go so far to imagine that a fish could actually survive in such a murky river. Well, no floating condoms yet, but plenty of empty water bottles and paper wrappers can be seen bobbing alongside the boats that take us tourists through the canal system.

But heck, I bet you want to know about the howling dogs, don't you? It's absolutely true. Every night after I put on my blinders (and more about that metaphor another time) and lull myself into the half sleep that is just barely possible when all the dusk-falling and its sleepy time cues are missing, I hear, off in the distance, and sometimes closer, and sometimes moving away, a pack of what sound to be about 6 dogs. There is a great commotion of snarling and biting and yowling, and I can imagine the flying specks of blood and saliva as these dogs move through the streets, searching for the stray cats (is it true? did there used to be four kittens running around the garbage bin outside my dorm, and now there are three? ).

Digression: right now I'm in the grotty internet cafe, the one with the "booths" for internet privacy. teh booths, I may have mentioned before, have curtains, so that you can use the cameras that are in them with impunity. When I have used those computers, I have been treated with random pornography sites that pop up out of nowhere and treat me to the basest tastes of the public internet user, and those usually involve child pornography.

Flash to the Nevsky Prospekt. Many of the young women on Nevsky Prospekt look like, well, what in my town might be described as hookers. Petersburg is a young city; most of the od people have died or moved away, and what is left is a young crazy city. So making my way down Nevsky Prospekt at any hour of the day or night is challenging because even those very tall blonde russian women wearing stilletos and very tight jeans (and oh, did I mention their breasts?), those women are moving quickly. They are on their way to somewhere, and someone told me that that somewhere is on the way to being married before they reach 23...or it's too late. Or something like that. Some of them marry quickly and then immdiately divorce, as it apparently is less shameful to be single after a divorce than to be single because never having married. In any case, there they are, in their tight white jeans, tight bodice enhancing and revealing shirts or blouses, push out bras, striding like amazons along the Prospekt. Can these women really be the future babushka, the woman who sits in every room of the Russian State Museum ensuring that no one touches or breathes on the painting by Filono or Maleich. These women wearing flat shoes, patterned skirts, blunt cropped short hair, and stern faces...did they used to be the young women of Petersburg striding their own version of the fashion statement? I guess it's the stilettos and the breasts that get me. I mean, given how short I am in comparison, this does mean that I spend a great deal of my time not only dodging around their quick pace, but also around their breasts...I don't have to avert my eyes, I have to wear safety glasses.

So, back to the internet cafe. Today I've asked for a computer facing the window that looks out to Kazanskya Prospekt. This means I can watch what's going on outside (the guy with dreads on his cellphone, pacing up and down in front of me and screaming at the person on the other end, the woman in the silver lame - is there any such thing? - the silver lame mini-dress and black and silver stilettos, a cigarette as long as her stiletto heel is tall, in her left hand...and on these computers, at least, there are no pornography pop ups - it's public, and I can be pretty sure, I hope, that...

The fire in the garbage bins? Yesterday morning on my way to class (?) I noticed, oh, I don't know, maybe 30 foot flames rising out of the garbage bin, and the accompanying smell of burning garbage. I suspected a smell of burning meat, too, so maybe that's where that fourth kitten disappeared to (sorry Larissa, but these kittens, well, they just get into everything, and thus probably also garbage cans). Astonishingly to me, and to some of the other NAmericans here, everyone seemed to blythly go about their business. And so I did too. Oh, a raging fire in a garbage bin, I will be able to say the next time I pass one. And not then wonder how to call a fire truck.

Men in dark suits, you ask? Steve, I know you are wondering about that one, and will be asking me to take the next bus out of here. Essentially, it goes like this: sitting in a restaurant yesterday at noon having lunch with two Canadian friends. Two men, wearing dark suits and sunglasses (yeah, I know, I know, how undercover can you get, how subtle?) sitting two tables away taking pictures. When I looked at them directly, which happened to be while the camera was aimed directly at our table, the guy with teh camera turned away and took a photograph of the ceiling.

So, is this just a Petersburgian taking pictures of tourists? And he just happens to look like a thug?

Its the pools of coagulated blood that I find the most curious. Every morning since I have come here I have seen blood on the streets. Sometimes the same blood hangs around for a few days, which means the packs of wandering dogs are not finding them and cleaning them up. But I have heard stories from the young men who are here and frequenting the bars that bar fights are not uncommon, and heard one story from a guy who turned a corner to find a guy bashing another guy's head into the concrete sidewalk, while the victim's girlfriend stood by smoking a cigarette and crying at them to stop. He finally stopped, and the victim got up and went into the bar with his girlfirend while the attacker went to his car, opened the trunk, removed his shirt, tossed it in, and then pulled out a clean one, put it on, went into same bar.

Or there is the guy from our program who spilled a beer on a russian bar patron and the patron responded by punching him in the face and knocking him out.

Okay, so Steve, you need to know that I'm not hanging out in bars, although I gotta tell you that the food situation here is so sketchy that I have started having a beer for each of lunch and dinner instead of eating. I've found it to be much cheaper and more reliable. It's also thirst quenching. Perhaps it also helps me to sleep better.

So, those pools of blood on the streets are interesting inscriptions from the Petersburg locals and the more adventurous of our group (there are 100 of us here) and are already starting to feel normal and now have begun merely to add resonance to the name of the Cathedral about 4 blocks away, the Church of the Spilled Blood. I haven't been there yet. I'm saving that, but it is a major tourist attraction, so it holds little attraction for me. So far.

Today I went to the Russian State Museum with Ann, a woman from Greenwich Village, 75 yrs old. She is director of an institute of urban design in the village, and as a young reporter was the first person to have interviewed Andy Warhol, who, at the conclusion of the interview, gave her a piece of his which was a two sided painting of a 2 dollar bill. She is currently working on the 2nd edition of a book on the history of design, which WW Norton is publishing once she includes the material on Russian design. Well, she is fascinating to spend time with, but not because of those things, but because she is just plain old fun. And, of course, we share in interest in the same time: early 20th century, so were both heading to the avant garde section of the museum where she wanted to see Kandinsky and I wanted to see. I saw...work by Filonov, a piece entitled King's Feast, another Cosmos, Shock Workers (Masters of Analytic Art), Dairy Maids, Peasant Family, Live Head, Formula of Spring. He was working in the early 20th century doing Cubist types of things while Picasso was hanging around with Gertrude Stein in Paris doing his Cubist thing. Interested in looking up more about Filonov. I also saw several pieeces by Malavich, and I want to also see if Linda Dalrymple Henderson mentions either of these two painters in her book, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. I know she has a chpater on Russian art, but I did not get to read it before I had to send it back to the Museum.

Speaking of Fourth Dimensions, I feel in a way as if I have stumbled upon one here in Petersburg. It does seem like a Fourth Dimension, a European-like city, architecturally, inhabited by grim-faced Russians. No helmet laws here, Steve, for any kind of bike (I say this now because a woman just blasted by, helmetless, on a motorcycle), and what would be the point, really, of having helmet laws in a city that does not fix its potholes?

And so missing nature is looking at my photographs of Cortes Island sunsets, the little cabin which by now is no longer covered with a tarp but with scadding, the beach at Smelt Bay, swimming in Hague Lake, lying in the sun, listening to nothing except the beating of my own heart. And maybe a raven. I was feeling strange for a while the other day, and wondering what was the cause, and then I realized it was the absence of nature. Yes, I am deeply immersed in culture, but what is culture without nature? Well, it's locked doors, stiletto heels, blood on the streets, packs of nocturnal dogs.

Speaking of ravens. The ravens in Petersburg sound different from the ones on Vancouver Island.