Out of the last 25 days that I've been here in Petersburg, only 7 have been sunny. 5 of those occurred within the last week, so it's been tough to anchor myself down and record anything in my blog. My hot water was turned back on long ago, followed by heating! Last week was brutal; in a sense it was the coldest time of the year. The temperatures dropped to the low forties, yet the city-controlled heating hadn't caught up. At home I sat huddled up under blankets, drinking copious amounts of tea and re-reading A Moveable Feast.

This morning I went to the printmaking studio and we worked on Monoprints for three hours. I'll put some photos up soon of the work I made today. After suffering from what Adam called "art block" all last week I was relieved to be productive in a studio again.



I met with the editors of the St. Petersburg Times last week and on Monday I'm going to start coming in and help edit articles before the paper gets sent to the press. After spending last year writing about Anna Politkovskaya, I've been anxious to learn more about the state of journalism in Russia. I'm hoping that this editing gig will help put me in a mindset to frame what I'm learning about for my project into articles to submit to the paper.

On that note, I went to a really great artist talk last week. Pavel Shugurov spoke to us about his project 33 plus 1. Although he is regularly employed to paint murals on buildings, in restaurants, cheesy pool backgrounds, etc.; his personal art ranges from installations to ceramics, drawing, painting, video art and artist books (!). After causing too much confusion by trying to explain to his friends why he couldn't narrow down his identity as an artist ("I'm a painter," or "I'm a sculptor") he created a web-based artist community featuring a cast of fictional artists each representing one aspect of Pavel's portfolio. Pavel showed us the matrix he had drawn up organizing which parts of his own persona belongs to each artist. He mentioned that his project has caused much confusion- such as the time 6 of the artists in the 33plus1 community were invited to do a collaborative installation tour and having to explain why he only needed one of the 6 bus tickets reserved for him.

I finally received my "golden ticket" to Russia- my student ID. The photo this time around is great, entirely due to the fact that the woman working at the Kodak store on Nevsky made sure that I went to the mirror and properly preened myself for my ID picture before she would take it. So far I've gotten a discounted gym membership (nothing beats post-soviet style aerobics), a balcony ticket for a symphony concert for 30 roubles ($1.20), and free admission to the Hermitage. What a country.