From Russia

Quietness on the blogging front is due mainly to a lack of illustrations stemming from the fact that I managed to leave my camera in London (rushing as I was out of the house when I realized that as of 1am the morning I left, we were now in BST, so it was an hour later than I had thought). Photographic evidence will have to wait, but I have been enjoying the following:
-A fancy-dress Vivaldi concert - 'a virtual journey to Venice' - featuring a string quartet decked out in period costume (including wigs and masks and such).
-Spotting an American "scholar" playing Solitaire on his laptop in the newspaper library.
-Peter the Great's bizarre collection of deformed things in jars, supposedly created in order to educate people about the natural and physical (as opposed to supernatural and spiritual) causes of deformity, along with some stuff collected by an enthusiastic anatomy popularizer with a passion, and prodigious talent, for embalming. (If it sounds like the plot of a weird East European arthouse film... well it's not far off).
-Restaurants where firearms and personal stereos are considered approximately equal as inappropriate accessories.
-An unsurprisingly uncontroversial Olypmic torch procession on Saturday, in which the Russians rather ingeniously (one might say, rather characteristically) totally ignored anything to do with China and Tibet, and made it in to a celebration of Russian national pride. Well, why not? At the same time, I'm rather impressed with what was achieved in London and Paris - not least by the magnificently successful efforts of Paris' municipal officials to embarrass the Chinese in a symbolically, rather than physically, violent protest of hanging a banner from the town hall, forcing the procession to be cut short.

A photo of me at fancy-dress Vivaldi (although not in fancy dress) is forthcoming...

And now back to the mountain of material about cholera which is my official purpose for being here...