The picture of Larry and me and Russian friends, Marina and Aleksey was taken at a fast-food restaurant at a smallish mall in St. Petersburg – clean, colorful, good food – but not crowded on a Saturday afternoon.
St. Petersburg - a sprawling, dusty, bustling city (traffic jams as you would find in NYC, streets filled with people even late at night) - so different from clean, hilly, small city of Stavanger. Everything is so reasonably priced here compared to Norway. People look prosperous - Larry and I went to a Mozart piano concert and the people watching was better than the performance !
Larry toured most of the week but worked some of Friday and Saturday. We went to the Hermitage, the 2nd largest museum in the world though much was closed for renovations. And to a brand new, huge mall (with a free small indoor ice skating rink) and lots of security folks about a 20-minute drive outside the city - IKEA + Benetton, + something like Sam's Club without a membership requirement where Willy, our Norwegian friend, bought a flat screen tv for about $600 and a camera. It was sad to think about the homogenization of everything but then why should the Russians be deprived of easy access to goods. The day before we had been to an indoor/outdoor market with lots of bargains and bartering that was much more interesting for Larry and me; such markets used to be the norm here but today there's just one large one left as malls take over.
Willy and Larry's colleagues have been our hosts and guides - both born here - living in a very small apartment they own by the Neva River. Aleksey speaks good English, but his wife Marina speaks German (so Larry and Willy can talk with her, but I can't.) The guides we've had at the Museums and the Orthodox church have been fiercely anti-communist but Aleksey misses aspects of those days (less crime, more equity, easier access to health care.) Perhaps the guides resent the destruction the Communists wrought on the art world. The number of people of all ages - both men and women - lighting candles and waiting in line to view some of the icons at the Kazansky Cathedral was very impressive. Surprising has been the many tall trees strung with holiday lights - all artificial except the one near the Winter Palace. Marina told us that decorating trees was a Russian custom in celebration of the new year long before Germany appropriated it for a Christmas custom.
I was very disappointed not to find Russian tea, or tea served from a samovar.

From St. Petersburg we traveled to Berlin so we could get our visas for Switzerland. Surprisingly, the Swiss weren’t able to process our applications in time for us to pick them up mid-November in Oslo. Then there was a snafu and mine wasn’t processed as of December 8, but interestingly it was ready by the 12th! Bureaucracy reigns all over. However, the detour gave us a good excuse to spend a few days in Berlin which Larry visited in 1962. At that time he was detained by the East Germans, the photos in his camera were confiscated and he spent a tense 6 hours waiting and in interrogation. When he was released he was told never to return to East Germany…. So we stayed in the former East Berlin in a wonderfully restored, very modern apartment house and spent most of our time in that part. We enjoyed a mix of history and art – with a wonderful 4 hour walking tour of Berlin, and visits to the Reichtag, Gemaldegalerie, Pergamon Museum, 2 trips to the Swiss Embassy (one of just a few buildings not damaged in WWII and the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The art in the Berlin museums was the focal point, where in St. Petersburg I felt the art played second fiddle to the buildings. In the museums we met Stavanger bridge/hiking Dutch friends and together enjoyed an excellent, German dinner in an old tavern that’s been in operation since the 1600’s. And the Gluhvein at the Christmas markets was delicious but not as good as the homemade one I enjoyed in Stavanger. The cleanliness and orderliness and stronger economy in Berlin was a real contrast to St. Petersburg.

From Berlin we traveled by a clean, comfortable train to Aachen with our 5 pieces of luggage (our excess baggage fee for the flight from St. Petersburg to Berlin cost almost as much as a ticket.) Larry met with a small company in Aachen that specializes in basin modeling, one of Larry’s areas of expertise. We had dinner at a 16th century tavern (rebuilt after WWII) with a colleague from Larry’s years at Chevron who was giving a short course to this company. From Aachen one can walk to Belgium or take a 45-minute train ride to Maastricht in the Netherlands – tempting but I’m staying in Germany. Aachen’s hot waters enticed the Romans to stay here but its fame began when Charlemagne built a huge cathedral here in the late 8th century. His remains are buried here and all the Holy Roman Emperors and Kaisers were coronated in this city of 260,000. Today it has a much more international citizenry than Berlin – perhaps because Berlin was isolated for so long after the war and has its former East German population as a source of low-skilled workers. At the train station hordes of day-trippers were coming to Aachen for a football match between Hamburg and Aachen; the partying had clearly begun on the train and the police were standing around to keep the peace.
Even though I miss my friends and Stavanger activities, I’ve enjoyed the weather in Russia and Germany – the sun has been much more visible and daylight hours more similar to Ithaca.

And now from Zurich where we’ll be living at Hochstrasse 56, 4044 Zurich, Switzerland until the end of March. We are in a ground floor apartment a 15 minute walk up the hill from the Limmat River in the center of town. A website search suggested that Wagner lived in this building for a short time in the 19th century, and I’ll look for corroborating evidence in January. Weather is cooler and sunnier than Norway but winter hasn’t really arrived.

Happy Christmas and more in 2007!