2003

ITALY

IT’S THE END OF MAY and I’ve only been out of the country once so far this year. Time for another trip and another journal. I have almost 50 countries under my belt, and I hope to hit that number this year, but in the meantime the rain in New York makes me think of sunny Italy. Let’s go.

First, let’s clear up a big misconception about Italy. Many maps of Italy show the country vertically, with the “boot” standing up. Most people think of Milan in the North and Taranto in the South. Right? But that’s only because it saves paper and you can make the map bigger if you orient it vertically. In fact, the line from Milan to Taranto lays on its side more than it stands up. So even though we speak of Northern Italy, we really mean West-by-Northwest Italy.

Trentino

Destination Trentino: the Italian Alps. Naturally, the best way to get there is to fly to Milan and then take a train, no? No. I’m headed for the hills, not the plains. The best way to go is to fly to Munich, walk around town for an hour or so, then take the Michaelangelo train south. The train goes through Austria, where I had two hours to explore Innsbruck, a charming mountain village that struck me as a great place to get away from it all.

Two hours later, I caught the next train and continued through breathtaking Brenner Pass, over the top of the Alps, and down to Trento, known in English as Trent. Trento was part of Austria until 1919, when Italy reclaimed the mountainous region as the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. It’s a charming medieval village surrounded by small industry. The people here are practical, unpretentious, and unstylish.

I met my friend Karina in Trento. Our goal was to spend the weekend exploring the mountains, the highlight of which was a visit to the Val di Genova – one of the few valleys left untouched by development. It’s a beautiful river-cut valley with four waterfalls and lush greenery and animals all over the place. Then she took me to a place I never would have found on my own – the Santuario de San Romedio. It’s a remote alpine monastery that has two brown bears living in a pen. The monastery closes at 6pm, but we arrived at 6:10 and the very nice old monk who lived there said he had waited for us to see the place before he closed the doors.

I’m generally proud of my sense of direction. When in Trento, which has a typical medieval layout (little streets going every which way), I was quite good at getting around. Karina came to rely on me to know which way to go, even though I’d only been there a day. One evening we parked and she started walking in the wrong direction. I told her I thought that my hotel was the opposite way. We asked some drunk guys hanging out near a tavern and sure enough, I was right. We entered the main square, where I immediately turned left. Karina asked whether my hotel wasn’t to the right. I looked at her as though she were 3 years old and said, “I’ll handle the directions, okay?” She shrugged and followed me. As soon as I took 3 more steps I realized she was right. This is one difference between men and women – men deal with directions so they can be right; women deal with directions so they can get somewhere.

After a lovely weekend in Trentino, I took the train north to Bolzano, the capital of the Alto Adige (Sudtyrol) province, more Austrian than Italian. People here speak mostly German, and the food is 60% German. Bolzano is cleaner and more efficiently run than Trento, and the shops are more upscale and sophisticated.

The amazing thing about Bolzano is that almost everyone has a bad haircut. For some reason, the majority of people here between 15 and 50 years old have two-tone hair. It’s like the hair colorists use the town as a testing ground. I got the impression that most of the women were wearing bad wigs from Halloween stores.

I stayed at a lovely small luxury/business hotel called the Greif, right on the town square. The selling point was an in-room laptop and high-speed Internet connection. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to get an @ sign on the keyboard, so I resorted to finding one online and then cutting-and-pasting it to send email messages to friends.

The next day I took a bus north into the heart of the Sudtyrol, the Val Gardena. Situated in the Dolomites, this wide glacier-cut valley is home to some interesting languages and dialects. In my last journal I wrote about Germanic languages. Today I’d like to break down the Latin languages.

The Latin-Based Languages

The primary Romance languages derived from Latin are: 1 French (including Occitan), 2 Italian (including Sicilian), 3 Portuguese, 4 Spanish (including Catalan and Valencian), and 5 one other major Romance language. Can you name it?

Europe is also home to several non-Latin languages, like Basque and Hungarian – Indo-European languages on their own separate branches of the tree. But a few languages developed from Latin independently of the “Big Five” – these languages survive today because they are isolated geographically from the main Romance-speaking areas. Galician, Corsican, and Asturian are examples. And a group known as Rhaeto-Latin languages have remained throughout the centuries because their speakers live in remote Alpine valleys with few visitors. The Rhaeto-Latin languages divide into three groups:

Friulian is spoken by about 500,000 people living in Italy’s Veneto district north of Venice and close to the Austrian and Slovenian borders.

Romansch is found in the Engadin Valley of Switzerland (center: St Moritz) and is that country’s fourth official language. Romansh has five dialects (Vallader, Puter, Surmiran, Sutsilvan and Sursilvan) spoken by a total of 50,000 people – less than 1% of Switzerland’s population.

About 30,000 people speak Ladin, which is divided into five dialects in the five valleys in the high Alps just south of Austria. One of those valleys is the Val Gardena, where I stayed.

The Climb

My guide, Adam, was a Ladin speaker. Soon after I arrived in the town of Ortisei (also known as Saint Ulrich), I found him in his mountan-guide office across the street from my fantastic hotel Adler (means “eagle”). I had brought my climbing shoes and wanted to get vertical in the Dolomites. Adam showed me several routes. We chose the First Tower of the Sella group.

The tower is about 600 feet high, with about a 90-degree pitch, which means fairly easy climbing. As it was my first outdoor climb in 23 years, we chose a route that had a few hard spots but was not too challenging overall.

Adam is a local climbing legend. He has several climbing records in the region and is going with an Italian group next year to climb Everest. He made his first ascent up El Capitan in Yosemite valley in seven hours (most people take 2-3 days). He’s one of those super-nice, easy-going local guys with an understated no-nonsense approach to life. Growing up in the vertical world of the Dolomites, a big ego is a liability.

We tied ourselves together using two skinny ropes rather than one thick one. It was chilly in the early-morning shade as Adam showed me the tricky spot on the first pitch that keeps many average climbers from attempting this route. My fingers were cold and there were no footholds, but I got past the first section and continued up. I found that my fingers could hold my weight even though they were too cold to feel the rock. I got to where he was standing and tied myself into the rock for the second pitch.

The Dolomites are carved of the same white limestone that runs from Normandy’s beaches to the Acropolis. It’s the remains of an ancient seabed, so it’s mostly powdered fish bones and shells – porous and soft compared to granite. The valleys here are carved by glaciers, so they have wide, flat floors and steep near-vertical sides. Most of the erosion is from frost action rather than moving water, so the cliffs are steep, jagged, and have occasional grottos carved out by the frost. Although the cliffs look ominous, the great feature of the Dolomites is their accessibility. Every tower, cliff, and peak here has hard, medium, and easy ways up. Nothing is unclimbable. The rock is angular, flaky, and positive – a climber’s term for easy to grab.

In the climbing gym, I tackle some fairly difficult routes, most of which are angled back over my head. I do a lot of pull-ups and keep my upper-body strong. But outside, with wind and insects and cold – I was reminded how different it was. I went slowly and carefully, listening to Adam’s instructions. My main concern was getting hurt carelessly, so I took my time and concentrated on form – keeping my hands low and looking down for foot placements rather than up for handholds. “Slow is fast,” I told Adam. “Right,” he said.

On the third pitch, I somehow lost my sunglasses. I LOVE my sunglasses. They are Maui Jim Waileas. When they’re not on my face, I wear them around my neck, from which they’ve never fallen. Until one difficult section on the third pitch. These are the lightest sunglasses in the world. They flipped off my neck and into space, immediately stabilizing themselves face-down and floating down the cliff face. Because they’re so light, they followed the air currents down the face without touching it for what seemed like minutes. We watched carefully and made a mental note of where they went out of site near our starting point. Then I went back to work. The sun coming through the clouds had warmed my hands but wasn’t so bright that I would need my glasses anyway.

The fourth pitch had some challenges. At a hard section, I tried and tried to do what Adam had done, but I couldn’t get a handhold, so I called up to Adam that I was falling. I swung on the rope a few meters to the left, found some good handholds, and made my way up. I only fell twice during the entire climb, which felt good. For Adam, of course, it was a walk in the park, another day at the office. These towers are climbed so often that there are cemented-in rings protruding from the rocks that you can tie into. Only a few times did Adam have to set a piece of portable protection (using a special device that clamps into the rocks).

The last pitch was easy climbing, so Adam made it a challenge by taking a more difficult route than normal, which was fun. After about two hours of climbing we were on top of what in Manhattan would be a 60-story office tower. I felt great. Energized. Not sore or fatigued at all. It was a great feeling to have lunch on top and to have been challenged but not so much that I was wiped out. It was a great first outdoor climb. We looked over at the only other people climbing, and Adam told me their route was much easier than ours.

We threw some hazel nuts for the yellow-beaked blackbirds, who dived over the cliff after them. We ate a lot of chocolate and nuts and drank down Adam’s home-brewed Gatorade stuff. We had a nice rest, then the clouds decided our lunch was over and it was time to put on our rain gear. It hailed on us for a few minutes as we roped in and took off down the mountain.

We went up in six pitches and down in three. The slight rain made the rope a bit wet, which made descending harder because the wet rope heats up more as it slides through the rings you use to slow yourself as you descend. So you go even slower and it’s more work to go down. Every time we descended, we had to haul the rope down through the top ring, from which it came sailing down on top of us. This is why you are glad you’re wearing a helmet – a rope falling 120 feet whips through the air with a sound you only hear in movies. You look down and hope it continues past you.

At the bottom, we found my glasses about 20 feet from my pack. The lenses were a little scratched, but not too badly. We packed everything up and headed for the car to take our photo. Adam complimented me and made me feel like a real climber, not a city-slicker, and the whole experience was so positive that I can’t wait to come back and climb again.

Spending time with Adam, I realized something about liars. I’ve been struck by the number of people in New York who lie. They lie about all kinds of things, from their identity to how they feel to keeping their word when they say they’ll do something. Not everone lies in New York, but I believe that there are more liars per 1000 people in New York than perhaps anywhere else in the US, with the probable exception of Los Angeles.

Growing up in a town of 5,000 people, as Adam did, there is practically no way to get away with a lie of any size. People from small towns are 100% honest because they have to be. Which made me realize that the larger the city, the higher percentage of liars. In a large city like New York, liars can easily escape a difficult situation by moving to a different group of people in the same city (in some cases, several times a day). In medium-sized cities, liars escape by moving to another city. In a small town, there simply are no liars.

Val Gardena

In the Hotel Adler I had accidentally found the luxury spa of the region. People wandered the halls in robes and terry slippers. There was a “waterworld” of pools, saunas, and plunges. There were many kinds of massage. There was an excellent gym with sophisticated machines that I’d used the previous day. After my climb and a shower, I found one of the single-person waterbeds and lay down for a nap.

This valley sees hardly any American tourists. Tourists come mostly from Germany and a few from Italy. The French have their own Alps. (Besides, what would they drink – Italian wine? I don’t think so.) The Austrians and Swiss enjoy the same mountains. So the language you hear most often is German.

At dinner in the hotel each night, you had your place reserved for you, which meant I sat next to the same couples every night. They explained that the strict seating arrangements were to help the wait staff provide the best service. The food was fantastic. I remember one night I had a fresh cherry-tomato juice that was really special. They handled my vegan appetite with relative ease.

The day after my climb, I joined the hotel group (they had so many activities that they printed a daily Adler News) for a long hike in one of the beautiful valleys. We were about 14 people plus the guide’s big sheepdog. We climbed about 3,000 feet and walked perhaps 8 miles in six hours. We saw lots of sheep, and I spotted the day’s only chamois – a brown mountain goat. These goats are excellent climbers, able to climb straight up in places where only good human climbers can go. I’m told that eagles who see them climbing will try to buzz them and cause them to fall and become dinner.

At the Hotel Adler, which I’m sure means well, the beds were so hard that I got a four-alarm back-ache on the second night. Fortunately, I always travel with Tylenol-3 with Codeine, and I needed it after our hike.

The Best Bed

Perhaps hotels have hard mattresses that please most of the people most of the time, but I had to ask for two extra feather beds so I could sleep on top of them. At home, I have two fairly firm mattresses and each bed has a wool mattress topper. On such a platform, I sleep like a rock without waking during the night. Guests who stay with me always ask what magic caused them to sleep so well. Here’s the recipe:

Get a fairly firm mattress that doesn’t cost too much and isn’t too fancy. A cotton futon works well because it breathes. Put it on a SLAT support, not a box-spring.

Then go to www.shepherdsdream.com and order one of their wool mattress toppers. They have three types, according to your body:

Order a travel mate (thin) if you are heavy and easily compress the mattress.

Order a snuggle mate if you are light and bony and need cushion to sink into, or if your mattress is really firm.

Order a David Siegel Special (which is in between the two) if you’re normal. They’ll make it for you.

The mattress topper is where you want to put your money. It’s good to keep it aired out and turn it often. Do this and you’ll sleep like a rock too. When you travel, simply get extra blankets to sleep on when you encounter a hard bed.

The Zipline and the Kids

The last day I was there, I went for a hike in the morning. I passed some children playing in an alpine playground. One of the apparatuses was a platform with a zip-line that the kids could slide down. It was a stainless cable with a poma-lift seat attached to a pole and a pulley at the top. You pull the seat up to the top platform, get on, and – zing! – you swing down the line about 60 feet to a gentle stop. A girl of about 5 was riding it, but a few kids were too small and wanted to ride, too. The babysitters were busy, so I hopped up and took control, making good use of my fictional years as an amusement-park-ride operator. I hauled the seat up, put the small kids on, and instructed them in my best German to keep their legs tight around the pole, and – whoosh! – off they went, screaming and giggling. I did this until everyone had taken a couple of turns and then said goodbye.

Querciabella

On to Florence, city of tourists. I transferred to a bus that whisked me south into the heart of the Chianti district, to a village called Greve in Chianti. My friends Jane and Sebastiano hosted me for two nights at their beautiful estate, where they grow some of the best San Giovese grapes in the country. Here were all the comforts of home: a Mac laptop and a DSL. Also, some of the best vegetarian food in the region, and some of the best wines. I sat right down to a dinner that included five wine glasses. We ate perfectly-cooked pasta, fresh sauce, and tried all the different wines.

The winery is called Querciabella, which means “beautiful oak tree.” You can order their wines through various distributors and restaurants. My personal favorite was the spectacular Palafreno 2000, a blend of San Giovese and Merlot grapes that was really unforgettable. As I said after Sebastiano poured it into the biggest of the big glasses, the glass was too small to hold this wine. He smiled. He’s very proud of the record he’s established since he took over the vineyard and winemaking operation several years ago. Querciabella wines are now ranked very highly and sell out easily. Their chianti is considered to be one of the three best in the region (hence, the world). Although Sebastiano noted that the war and other events have conspired to drive wine prices down seriously, he said that the French had been hardest hit and that Italy was reaping something of a windfall. His wines have done well.

Much of the credit goes to the care he takes in the process. They dry-farm the grapes (irrigation is illegal in Chianti) with special methods called BioDynamic, which are much more strict and careful than simply organic. You can see and taste the difference in the grapes. They use only the most expensive French oak casks, and only for two years, after which they send them to someone else to use in making inferior wine. The place is spotless and very controlled. So much work for a bottle of wine! So much love. So much taste. A toast to my friends in Chianti – I hope to come back soon.

This travelogue is dedicated to the memory of Charles Steele, who loved Italy and will be missed deeply by his friends.

Happy travels…

David Siegel

Notes
The fifth Romance language is Romanian.

Links
This page shows all language diagrams and maps for the world. The maps are fascinating:
Language Family Trees

The best sunglasses:
Maui Jim Titanium

Bed resources:
Shepherd’s Dream
VSS Sleep

Italy:

Planning a trip to the Sudtyrol? Visit:
Val Gardena

Want to go climbing? Make arrangements with
Catores Climbing School (they even have shoes for you)

Planning a trip to Venice?
This map will come in handy

Planning a trip to Florence? Search for Hotel Berchielli on this site:
All Florence Hotels

Try the wine:
Querciabella

Learn more about BioDynamic viticulture

RUSSIA

NOTHING LIKE REMODELING to get you out of your apartment. We had the floors sanded and refinished, and for that EVERYTHING had to be off the floors, including me. So we stuffed all the clothing and furniture into the fire stair, blocking it completely, and I got on an Aeroflot flight for Moscow.

But first I would get a foretaste of the scams to come. Everything in Russia is a scam, and if you’re new to the game you arefresh bait. I went to get my ticket at the agency in New York, and they charge a $75 fee for my official letter of invitation. They told me I would need a complete blank page in my passport for the visa they were going to sell me. My passport didn’t have any more blank pages, except three at the end reserved only for notes. These pages, as it turns out, are not official passport pages. Couldn’t they find a place to stamp somewhere? No. I had to go to the State Department and get an extra 24 pages sewn into my passport. But I was leaving in 11 days, and the passport with the new pages had to be back in the agency’s hands within a week of leaving, or my visa would have to be expedited, which would cost another $250. Fortunately, they said, they can expedite the page-sewing for me, for only $180. I said forget it.

I spent the next two days in the lobby of the State Department’s passport office. “This is how one should prepare for a trip to Russia,” I thought. Forty eight hours of solid bureaucracy, and I’m still in New York.

With 7.1 days to spare, I managed to deliver my passport (with the extra pages sewn in) to the agency and avoided the expediting fees. They weren’t too happy about that. They asked at what hotel I was staying in St Petersburg, and I said “Tolstovsky House,” which brought the entire office to a complete standstill, including the cute skinny girl whose attention I’d been trying to get anyway. “How do you know about Tolstovsky House?” they asked. I told them I have a friend in St Petersburg (i.e., they weren’t going to get any fees from me for booking a hotel). They frowned. My passport and visa came back to the agency about 14 hours before my flight. So much for Travelocity. The people at the agency told me I should arrive at the airport at least three hours before my flight. Yeah, right.

Getting There

The flight to Moscow was, in fact, a breeze. All my papers were in order. My vegan meal on the plane was delicious. Once I had cleared customs at Moscow Airport, I discovered that there were no signs in English and that it looked a lot like I was going to have to go to some other airport to get my domestic flight to St Petersburg. I went down to the taxi stand, where it was raining Croats and Frogs. There was no real taxi situation, just a bunch of guys hawking their services. One guy told that the ride to the domestic airport would be 800 rubles (about $28), and showed me a printed plastic-coated card of the “official” ride rates. I told him I’d pay 200, and he said forget it. I walked away and he said 400. I kept walking and he said okay.

I got in the car, and that’s when my adventure started. It was raining hooves and antlers at this point, and the old putt-putt Russian car had no windshield wipers (no cars in Moscow have windshield wipers – they’d be stolen if they did). So we drove crazily and absolutely blindly, and it wasn’t long before we had covered the 8 kilometers to the other airport.

At this airport, there is even less English than at the International airport. And the rules are less clear. I managed to find the right place to check in and got on the plane with minutes to spare – no thanks to the travel agency. After too many hours of travel, I met my friend Dasha at the Saint Petersburg airport, where we bargained with several cab drivers before finding one who would take us to town for a reasonable amount of money (basically, they all had to see if any other Americans had arrived from whom they could get more; when they saw there were no more people coming out, they decided to take our offer).

Saint Petersburg

Ah, the Toltovsky House, located very near the Nevsky Prospect (the main street in town), is no luxury hotel. The strange thing about Russia’s economy is that everything is really quite affordable except hotel rooms. The town, as usual, was pretty much sold out, unless you wanted a $1200/night suite at the Grand Hotel. In fact, my room was fine, but it was more like a relatively clean apartment than a hotel. The woman who checked me in spoke no english, but she happily took my passport for the next 24 hours. For a fee, she would register me with the government. If you arrive in Russia and don’t register, the KGB come looking for you, so you need to register, and (surprise!) that costs money.

In addition, no one drinks the tap water in Saint Petersburg, because it carries giardia. Not even the locals drink it without boiling first. This is mostly true in Saint Petersburg, not elsewhere in Russia.

I spent four nights in Saint Petersburg. For three of them, my friend John from London joined me. So Dasha played tour guide to David and John, and the weather was gorgeous. It was cold – just a few degrees above freezing – but very sunny and beautiful most of the time. Saint Petersburg is a charming city, complete with canals and old stone mansions. My goal was to spend my birthday (September 17th) in the Hermitage Museum, which was of course closed that day. But we spent both the 16th and 18th there, and I saw probably 80% of the public rooms. It was great just spending that much time in the three main buildings that make up one of the world’s largest museums. You’ll see in our photos that the three of us had a great time.

A few months before, I had seen The Russian Ark, a truly remarkable film shot entirely in the Hermitage in one single take. To do this, the filmmakers had to invent new digital cameras, hire over 800 actors, keep thousands of lights and multiple sets hot, and roll with the punches as they steady-cammed their way through many of the main ballrooms and back rooms of the palace. It was a remarkable technical achievement, and the film is a joy to watch. I hope you’ll have a chance to see it.

The single most amazing thing about the Hermitage is, of course, the museum itself, built over centuries with rooms made of different elements and stones and miraculous ceilings and floors and decorations. But I want to mention that their fine collection of 20th century paintings, which I found breathtaking. They are deep in Monets and Matisses, and Gauguins and Renoirs. It was such a pleasure looking at many of these paintings I’d only seen in books. Even though I was tired I went back and saw them several times.

In Russia, it’s fun to try to learn what the letters mean and discover that a sign that was before incomprehensible actually says PEPSI. I figured out enough letters to go around reading the words on all the signs in a strong Russian accent, which Dasha enjoyed. The alphabet looks like something recently barfed out of a Cuisinart full of Greek and Roman letters, but in fact the Cyrillic alphabet has been around since the 9th century. I was so surprised at how many signs I understood once I could read some of the letters – they were very often their English counterparts. For example, MY3EN (with the “N” backwards) says “MUSEUM”.

I looked all over the city for a cool T-shirt with Russian letters, but no dice – all the clothes I found were either from companies you’ve never heard of, like Polo, Levis, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Versace, etc. Or they were knock-offs of same.

The street life in Saint Petersburg is very animated. There is the 20-year-old girl who rides her horse on the sidewalks of the Nevsky Prospekt, talking with her friends, smoking cigarettes, and giving rides to any tourists who ask. It’s strange to hear the hoof-clops in the underground passageways people clog through on their way home from work. The people walking on the street could easily be Americans. Except for the shoes and the cheap leather coats, I’d say only about 30% of the people have the round-face eastern look of Russians, like Vladmir Putin has. The rest could be residents of Pittsburg.

I feared the food situation, but in Saint Petersburg you can get everything; sushi and pizza are plentiful and good. John took me to Viktor Sushi for a lovely birthday dinner. I took Dasha to a beautiful Indian restaurant called Swagat, way out of the center of town, where we had so much food that I asked if she wanted to take the rest home in a bag. She told me Russians never do this. I discovered a vegetarian non-dairy dumpling called a pelmeny, which I ate gladly whenever I was in a Russian restaurant, like the literary Café Idiot. Russians love creamy food – most lunch places are smorgasbords of creamy salads and whips and sandwich toppings.

The Russian people fall into three classes: homeless, poor, and extremely rich. The homeless I’ll discuss in a second. Most people are poor. The average person earns about $40/month and subsidizes his income with anything he can get. Want a taxi? Just put out your hand and several private cars will stop. You negotiate a fixed fee for going to your destination before getting in. It wasn’t long before I knew how many rubles to propose to a driver for a given distance. And then there are the rich. There is no demand for an $80 bottle of champagne in Russia. But the $400 bottles sell regularly. The people with money in Russia have unlimited amounts of money.

And guess which group the police fall into? Cops make about $40 a month, so they make a game out of accosting tourists and shaking them down for money. I was told they probably wouldn’t let me go without a payoff – I’d end up at the police station waiting until I managed to pay my fine. They ask to see your papers and say they are no good. And they help each other out. The police station must be basically a place where white tourists are brought in, money is shaken out of their pockets, and the cash is split between all the players before the tourist is allowed to go. I kept an eye out for the men in blue and crossed the street to avoid them.

We spent a lot of time walking and jogging the canals, bridges, and back streets. It’s a charming city, and there are treasures everywhere. The “Church of Blood” (as Dasha calls The Church of Spilled Blood) was empty and closed for years, but has recently opened after a many-year restoration. It’s amazing, with its many onion-shaped towers and fanciful decorations.

Julia

I was walking to the Church of Blood one day when a small girl named Julia (pronounced “Yulia”) came to me and held my hand. She was about 5. She was dirty, brown-eyed, and homeless, and she reached in and grabbed my heart. After two seconds of hand holding, I was ready to sign the adoption papers. She wanted money for food (she showed by putting fingers into her mouth). Her brother and sisters nearby came at me for money. I let her hand go and we went on (I never give money to panhandlers).

That night I fantasized about offering her mother cash and taking her home with me. I decided that you can’t take a child who isn’t an orphan unless you are willing to take the entire family. But I couldn’t get Yulia out of my mind. The next day I went to the same place and waited. They came – three sisters, ages 5 – 9, and a small brother, about age 4. I spoke with them. They were very dirty. They all had some sort of skin infection and showed me scabs on their collar bones, elbows, and rib cages. They were Kazakhs – members of the gypsy underclass. I asked about their father. They indicated he was dead. I asked about their mother. They said she was home. I asked where they lived. They pointed. I was thinking about taking Yulia through immigration and getting her to a doctor in New York when a white man ran up to them and shouted: “Where is my photoapparat you weasels!? Photoapparat!!!” The kids scattered. They had seen angry people before, and they had probably taken his camera. But they were too fast for him. He chased but it was useless. They vanished in less time than it took to say “photoapparat.”

I went back the next day to look for Julia, but she wasn’t there.

One night John and I found a real traditional restaurant and had a lovely meal. The pianist played various inspired pieces. And then for dessert several of the Russians got up and danced to his campy music. They were slightly drunk, but the men actually crossed their arms in front of their chests and did the Cossack dance with style. There were polkas and oom-pahs and all manner of folk dances, which became more animated as the pianist played faster and the locals got drunker. I later learned that this place is mostly a tourist trap, and I suppose that those people were encouraged to come provide some entertainment for the European clientele.

It’s time for me to admit that Saint Petersburg is probably the best city in the world for admirers of thin women, and I am such an admirer. For some reason, the genes here produce girls who can walk through the narrowest of doorways without having to turn sideways. I often believe that I can recognize a woman from Saint Petersburg on the streets of New York by her style of clothing and her hips. If I don’t have any luck in New York, I should probably come to Saint Petersburg to meet my future wife (cheaper than getting therapy).

To Moscow

The fifth night I took an overnight train to Moscow, which was full of strange dreams and waking to pee in the middle of the night. I arrived early in Moscow and it didn’t take long before I noticed the difference. Moscow is to Saint Petersburg as Los Angeles is to San Francisco. It’s gray, cement, has lots of traffic, and the Internet connections are good. Moscow may be sophisticated but it lacks charm in large quantities.

But. If you’re a fan of modern painting, you have your work cut out for you. The New Tretyakov Gallery has a huge collection of suprematism, cubism, and Russian Avant Garde. While most tourists prefer to see Russian Icons or the art of the Tsars, I spent most of a day here gawking at paintings and sculptures I’d only read about. Here is Chagall, Malevich, Kandinsky, and even El Lissitzky! This is the birthplace of idealism in modern art – the chance for art to lead the world into a new century, a new beginning, a new way of seeing, living, and expression. Boy, did that not happen. But the paintings are the blueprints to this society that was never built, and I will go back and look at them over and over because you can’t get anywhere without a vision and people to inspire you. I’m glad that, unlike their nuclear weapons or their weaponized smallpox virus, the Russians have set aside enough money to protect their art. In the end, it may be more valuable – I wouldn’t want to see El Lissitzky in the hands of an evil terrorist!

The weather was decent, so I walked a lot. I covered much of the town on foot, even straying into a very local farmer’s market, where men sat on the backs of trucks dispensing sacks of potatoes and using an abacus to add up people’s bills. I stayed at a nothing fancy hotel. If I go back, I’ll stay at the Hotel Ararat – it’s in the right location, near the Kremlin. I saw many of the usual things one is supposed to see in Moscow, and they didn’t do that much for me. I don’t really have to go back to Moscow, except that I did meet a very nice woman there who works at an art gallery, and we had two lovely dates. But maybe the things I like from Moscow will come to New York, and then I won’t have to go back at all. Are you listening, curators of the Met and MOMA?

Time to go back and finish my remodel. It’s about 7am. I take the taxi to the airport. I pay the guy, get out, and head for the door. I am 15 feet from the door at the airport when a cop grabs me, spins me around, and says “passport.”

This guy speaks no English. I tear away from him and head for the entrance. He chases me down and grabs me. We are standing in the doorway. He’s not going to let me go. He says “PASSPORT!” The other cops are watching. For some idiotic reason, I hand him my passport. He looks at it and says “Nyet, nyet, nyet.” He speaks in Russian about how my papers are in terrible shape and I am in big trouble. He tells me I’ll have to go to the police station with him and I’ll be put in a cell and sodomized by other ruthless American tourists whose passports are also derelict. I don’t make eye contact. I put my eyes on the ground and shake my head, saying “I don’t understand.” He tries again. I keep wagging my head. It’s a standoff. I’m patient. He looks around, sees the other cops watching. He tries again. I don’t move. People go past us with their luggage – some of them probably Americans with passports. He’s losing opportunities. I’m not budging.

Finally, he gives up, hands me my passport, and I dash into the airport, stand in the wrong line for security, stand in the wrong line for my flight, and I ask the nice Aeroflot lady where the flight to New York is. She has no idea. I ask for the manager. She has no idea. She is shaking her head back and forth, looking at the ground. I tell her I just want to know where to go to get my flight to new york! She looks at the ground and wags her head no. I start to raise my voice, asking for a manager. No manager, nyet, nyet, nyet. I start to yell. She’s not budging. Other passengers are looking at me like I’m losing my opportunity to yell at several other Aeroflot people. Finally, a passenger in line tells me I’m on the wrong side of the airport, that I have to cross the lobby and go through security again.

If you go to Moscow, always go to the airport at least three hours before your flight.