Friday

I'm in the Hermitage, but I'm not done with it yet, so I'll tell you about it later. It's pretty remarkable, though.

Friday was kind of a good news/bad news day. We'll start with the good news, because that came first.

The good news is that there was an Elton John concert in Dvortsovaya Ploschad (Palace Square, but it doesn't sound quite right in English). This is a fairly impressive venue for anything, since it's in between the Hermitage (which is vast) and some other large structure, which I can't find the name of. In the center is the Alexandrine Column, which is a tribute to Alexander I's victory over Napoleon. Also, the October Revolution started there. Anyway, the concert wasn't precisely free, but it was very easy to stand just outside the concert, or just across the street from the concert, and hear it fine. I arrived with a few others (people from the program, and a couple friends one of them had who happened to be in St. Petersburg) somewhere between Funeral for a Friend and Love Lies Bleeding, and left a few songs after Rocket Man. Not bad.

Unfortunately, it was raining, so we got pretty wet. This is not the bad news. Nevsky prospekt was full of police all day, presumably in connection with the concert, and they all looked pretty miserable. This is also not the bad news.

The bad news goes something like this: one of the girls in the program got sick on Monday or Tuesday, and went to the American clinic. I knew more about the situation than most, which was that she came to lunch with antibiotics one day for what might have been an infection, and was in the clinic the next day. That day they mentioned that she was in the clinic, and told us that everything was fine--she was doing a lot better already.

You can see, I hope, where this might have been confusing to us: most of us barely had a clue anything was wrong at all, and "she's doing a lot better already" sounds very serious. She's been in the clinic since then while they run tests to try to figure out what kind of antibiotics to use, but we hadn't heard much more about it. Anyway, on Friday the first test results came back, and apparently they were inconclusive in a way that suggested more than one kind of infection, and they've decided to send her back home--maybe today, maybe tomorrow. So after the concert we went to visit her.

It was a little depressing: the stomach trouble she's been having (apparently it was quite bad for a while) could actually be something more serious than an infection, and she's being sent home at the beginning of a good program, and none of us know her well enough to say anything really helpful. It was obvious that she was glad just to have people around, though, so it's good that we went.

...after that we went to a bar. I have now probably spent more time in bars in Russia than in America (in spite of Chris's best efforts), and have probably also consumed more beer in Russia than in America (by about a fluid ounce--I'll try anything, but damned if I'm willing to actually drink the stuff).

Ok; I think that's everything. Except the Hermitage.

Patience.