Dear friends and family, This is (gasp) Email #10 from this trip. I keep feeling that I haven't written enough, but I guess I've been fairly diligent. We (or I should say Inez and her friend Linda Predovsky) had planned this side-trip excursion

Dear friends and family, and future friends, The Hermitage continues: This lovely fabric is pretty enough, especially when you realize it is made by hand with silk threads that look about as fine as spiderwebs. The design looks identical on each side. The

Too much of a welcome.  On our first evening in St. Petersburg, we wandered into a local restaurant which seemed to have a lot of young Russian people in their clientele, and shortly after sitting down were joined by a drunk Russian man