*cough* *wheeze*

If you’re gonna get sick while trav­el­ling, where better to do it than the house of a Rus­sian Jewish mother who hap­pens to be your second cousin. I have had roll­mops and beet­root salad foist upon me like there’s no tomor­row, I’m cur­rently sip­ping hot black­cur­rant tea with vit­amin C powder and I had lots of vodka with dinner and cognac poured in my after-dinner coffee (medi­cinal, don’t you know).

Of course, I would­n’t *be* sick if it wer­en’t for icky St Peters­burg weather (rainy, windy, bloody hor­rible) and the damned *dust* every­where. The entire city is covered in it.

Anyhow, today I dragged myself through the Her­mit­age (oh god, I need another three days there please) feel­ing quite sur­real as the fever kicked in, stand­ing in the room where Nikolai was arres­ted by revolu­tion­ary sol­diers and trying not to laugh out loud at the Amer­ican girl who said “Oh yeah, I read a Dani­elle Steele book about that girl Ana­stasia” when her guide tried to tell her about the family being killed. I saw Nikolai II’s lib­rary, the huge col­lec­tion of French paint­ings, the Egyp­tian room… oh, my feet hurt.

I’ve also been to the Smolny and walked through the Summer Palace and other stuff and done research for my next story. St Peters­burg is *huge* and everything is very far away from everything else. Did I men­tion my feet hurt?

Anyhow, there are poems on the way at some point… ones about Zack, ones about polit­ics and war. I’m also wor­ried about cer­tain friends who said they’d write after pan­icked phone calls and haven’t… you know who you are… Everything okay?