I'm sitting on the window sill, in the little nest I've created here, complete with a blanket underneath my ass and a pillow for my back. I've chosen this spot because of the view, of course - endless roofs and then suddenly the "skyscraper," the focal point. They light it up completely around 5 pm, when it's beginning to get dark, but by midnight, the light remains only in the upper part, where there're no apartments. At 4 or 5 in the morning, it is completely dark again, but during the day it stands out not just for its size but for the whiteness as well, or beige-ness: they've completed a pretty complex cleaning procedure recently on all seven or eight similar buildings, getting rid of all the grime. I hope one night I'll catch the moment they turn the lights off completely - the movie-like effect of it is sure to freak me out: the huge building going dark momentarily...

***

I interacted with one of our next-door neighbors today, Galina Vasilyevna, a small, bespectacled woman in her 70s, famous for her bitchiness. She rules this nine-story building - and holds it together, too: the staircase is immaculate, with potted plants on every window, and there's a Soviet-looking plaque hanging on the brick wall outside, announcing that this is "the building of exemplary order."

When we were moving in, with all our 60 or so cardboard boxes of shit, she demanded that we unload the car as fast as possible, in order not to freeze her plants to death by keeping the doors wide open. She also wanted to know whether we were planning to have an office at our place, something that she seemed ready to send us to jail for, no less.

The movers helped us unpack and took away most of our boxes, but half a dozen or so remained, and Galina Vasilyevna somehow found out about it and said she needed the smaller ones to store her homemade pickles in. The janitor would take the bigger boxes, she said, and this is how I came into contact with her today: while I was taking the boxes to the storage place for the janitor to pick up later, she followed me around, asking questions and making statements.

She asked me how long we were going to stay here and whether we were from St. Pete or Moscow - I didn't know the answer to the first question and, somehow, I managed to skip the Kyiv part of our bios. She said she hoped we wouldn't have too many noisy visitors, and I assured her we were serious, adult people, totally trustworthy. She said it was dangerous when strangers came around - someone got robbed here not long ago, despite having two metal doors in his apartment. A boy downstairs always played some musical instrument after 11 pm, she said, and she kept chiding him for that.

The street was normally quiet and only sometimes it turned loud when... and here I interrupted her, saying something about the midday traffic jams... but she was talking about something else: "There's a synagogue across the street, you know, and every once in a while they have holidays, and they are celebrating all night long, a shabash, you know." I wasn't really sure if she was being neutral or was alluding to a witches' Sabbath, so I reacted rather diplomatically: "I think the daily traffic jams in a narrow street are the real problem here, not the Jews celebrating something once or twice a year." Thankfully, it worked: "Yes," she said. "We demanded that the authorities make it a one-way street, but they didn't pay attention."

At some point, she asked me about my occupation, and I said I was a journalist.

"Oh. Journalists, they are very dangerous people. You've got to be very careful around them, not say too much to them."

She seemed to be talking to herself, not to me, and it was really funny. I'm curious now about her past experiences with journalists - and I'm also extremely happy that there's something about me she's sort of scared of, something that would keep her from constantly preaching to me about "exemplary order."

But we parted on a very good note: I praised her plants, sincerely, and she promised to later show me the ones that are now blooming inside her apartment.

***

In the evening, our landlady, Natasha, stopped by with her husband and told us that, luckily, Galina Vasilyevna was growing less authoritarian with age. Some thirty years ago, when Natasha was a teenager, it was much worse: they had a semi-manual elevator then, with the doors that you had to close yourself before it would move, and the loud bang was so unavoidable that Galina Vasilyevna used to leave the elevator doors open after 11 pm, parking the elevator solidly on the ninth floor, preventing anyone in the building from using it and making noise.

Natasha also told us about one of her previous tenants, a British guy: one day Galina Vasilyevna came up to Natasha and asked her if she knew who she was renting her place to. "Of course, I do," Natasha replied. But it turned out that Galina Vasilyevna had spent some time doing surveillance and knew better: "No, you don't! He's a foreign spy! Every Saturday, he goes to a café at Mayakovsky Square, around noon, to meet someone there, and every time he's wearing the same red jacket! He's a spy!"

***

Natasha has also mentioned that she was on that subway train that was blown up a year ago: "I never thought it'd happen to me - but it did." She wasn't willing to talk about it in detail, I could feel it. She said that even though Moscow was her native city, she was beginning to hate it more and more.

What a mess... The vote for Tymoshenko has been postponed from noon to 4 pm Kyiv time (which is in 15 minutes); Poroshenko was supposed to have his man as minister of internal affairs, but now he's only getting a governor of Zaporizhzhya region, and Tymoshenko's Oleksandr Turchynov will head the internal affairs ministry instead, or perhaps it'll be Yuriy Lutsenko, a Socialist...

This is what reading Ukrainska Pravda is like today... Names, rumors and guesses.

It's as if they are all decorating a Christmas tree at the last possible moment, fighting and misplacing stuff, but eager to have it all look perfect at midnight.

Maybe it's calmer and more organized in reality, though. Will see what happens at 4 pm.

It's eerie to realize that the Georgian prime minister Zurab Zhvania has died on the day Yulia Tymoshenko is supposed to be approved as the prime minister of Ukraine, especially considering we have our own Zhvania - David - in what used to be the Ukrainian opposition until very recently. Unlike the two planes leaving the same airport and then falling from the sky almost simultaneously back in August, this is probably just a twist of fate. (That the planes crashed on August 24, Ukraine's Independence Day, is also nothing but a coincidence.)

Here's an AP report on Zhvania's death:

Apparent Gas Leak Kills Georgian Premier
By the Associated Press

Published: February 3, 2005
Filed at 2:21 a.m. ET

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) -- Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania, who helped lead the revolution that toppled the corruption-tainted regime of Eduard Shevardnadze, was killed early Thursday by an apparent natural gas leak, the ex-Soviet republic's interior minister said.

Zhvania, 41, was at a friend's apartment when the leak occurred, Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said in a live broadcast on Rustavi-2 television.

"It is an accident," Merabishvili said. "We can say that poisoning by gas took place."

Security guards broke through a window early Thursday when they heard no signs of life inside several hours after the prime minister arrived, Merabishvili said. Zhvania had entered the apartment at about midnight and the guards broke in between 4 a.m. and 4:30 a.m.

His host, Raul Usupov, deputy governor of Georgia's Kvemo-Kartli region, also died.

An Iranian-made gas-powered heating stove was in the main room of the mezzanine-floor apartment, where a table was set up with a backgammon set lying open. Zhvania was in a chair; Usupov's body was found in the kitchen.

"It all happened suddenly," Merabishvili said.

Central heating is scarce in Georgia and many people use gas or wood stoves in their homes.

A longtime politician, Zhvania was part of the opposition to former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and played a prominent role in protests that led to Shevardnadze's ouster after allegedly fraudulent elections in November 2003.

President Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the protests, named Zhvania prime minister following his landslide election in January 2004. Zhvania was considered a moderate to counterbalance to the more impetuous president, and he was one of the key government figures trying to negotiate settlements with Georgia's separatist regions.

Zhvania was born in the capital Tbilisi on Dec. 9, 1963. A graduate of the biology department at Tbilisi State University, he led the Green of Georgia party in 1988-93 and served in the parliament beginning in 1992.

He became parliamentary speaker in 1995 and led the moderate United Democrats opposition party, and for several years he and Saakashvili were rivals for leadership of the opposition.

Like Saakashvili, Zhvania was a one-time ally of Shevardnadze. After breaking with Shevardnadze, however, Zhvania followed a more conciliatory path than Saakashvili, and he was considered a more moderate politician who sought consensus rather than conflict.

Zhvania is survived by his wife and three children.

We almost got robbed during our train ride from St. Pete to Moscow.

We took a lousy, late-night train that, unlike some of the better ones, arrives in Moscow at a decent time - around 10 am, instead of 6 or 7. We were in a two-bunk compartment - normally, they call it first class here, but this particular train was too decrepit to deserve such a high title.

Something woke me up in the middle of the night. When I opened my eyes, I saw the little lock by the door handle moving - I knew right away someone was messing with it outside. Then the door slid open just a bit, and a few moments later the additional little lock in the top corner of the door was pushed down (most likely with a wire), and the door slid open some more. I had enough time to look at the man standing in the well-lit hallway before I realized it was time to act: I sat up on the bunk and asked in a sleepy but firm voice: "Who is it?" The man was rather big and was wearing a gray sweater; he closed the door at once and, possibly, left.

Mishah slept through all this and when I woke him, he suggested that I'd been having a nightmare. The door was unlocked, however, and he was forced to believe my story. We decided not to follow the guy, partly because we were totally exhausted from the day spent packing and the night spent drinking, but also because we didn't feel it was safe: they say thieves don't kill, according to some sort of the underworld etiquette, but faced with the choice of either getting caught and going to jail or hitting someone on the head and quietly leaving the scene, chances are some people would prefer the latter option.

In the morning, the door to our compartment wouldn't open and we had to call provodnitsa. I told her about the incident (which actually took place around 5 am) and suggested it'd be a good idea for her to buy extra locks and hand them out to the passengers, to avoid trouble. She said she had the locks but had figured that people would come up to her themselves. Maybe, she said, she should indeed leave a lock on the table in each compartment - on a napkin.

I described the guy I'd seen, and she said there were three of them that night, loitering in and outside her car, until she chased them away. One said he came here to visit his uncle but when she asked for the uncle's name, he said he didn't remember it (the passengers' names are on their tickets; provodniki collect the tickets when you border the train and return them in the morning).

She complained that there were no police on this particular train (there're always at least two cops on better trains, traveling all the way to the final destination), and that the train station cops knew all the thieves working on this route, but were either unable to gather enough evidence against them, or were being bribed not to try too hard.

Then she told us an amazing thing: when provodniki manage to catch a thief, they gather together, five of them or so, and break the poor guy's fingers - with a door, on both hands, just like that, thus forcing him into early retirement. This may sound too brutal - and remindful of the Islamic prescription to chop off the thief's hands - but they really have no choice: provodniki are risking their miserable jobs if the thefts continue, while the police are better off not doing anything about it.

***

Mishah and I have been robbed on a train once before: in summer 2003, on our way from Odesa to Kyiv, also in a two-bunk compartment of a lousy Odesa-Chernihiv train. That time, we didn't hear a thing. Mishah had two cell phones then, one for his private conversations and the other for the long-distance battles with his colleagues. He spoke on the second one right before going to sleep and put it on the table; in the morning, it wasn't there.

Also, there were only 11 hryvnias ($2) left in Mishah's wallet - just enough to take a cab from the train station. I'm still totally charmed by this act of kindness - but it also means that we were robbed by a real professional.

The provodnitsa on that train must have been an accomplice - in the morning, she wanted us to believe that she was genuinely surprised: "Oh, but how is it possible to unlock the door??!!" Man, even I could have easily done it with a piece of wire or something...

But, knowing how things work in this part of the world, we didn't demand investigation or anything and, after a brief pro forma scandal, just took a cab home, paying with the money left for us by the thief.

I haven't been out much these past three days - just a few quick runs to a nearby store and to a nearby Lebanese café - but here're my first impressions of Moscow:

- Compared to St. Pete, there's no dog shit to step into...

- People in the street look so average compared to those in our St. Pete neighborhood: there, every third person could be mistaken for an actor rehearsing for some underworld role in a Dostoyevsky-based theater production; here, I've sighted Mark Rozovskiy today, the director of one of the small yet renowned theaters located nearby...

- All we could see from our four windows in St. Pete were our building's roof, the neighbors' windows and the courtyard; here, there's the huge city outside the four (yes, again) windows: a recently renovated synagogue, the TASS building, one of the box-like buildings on Noviy Arbat, the roofs stretching out all the way to the horizon, the Stalin-time "skyscraper" I posted a photo of yesterday, a business center with its name unchanged - World Trade Center, written in huge letters in English, lit up in bright yellow at night...

- I caught myself thinking today that if something horrible happened here again, I'd no longer be able to pretend it's somewhere far away, somewhere in Moscow - because I am in Moscow now, again...

A brief history of the war in Iraq in quotes and paraphrases - What I Heard about Iraq, by Eliot Weinberger, in the London Review of Books (via MoorishGirl):

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.’

Thank you, Hello, for this link:

Yulia Tymoshenko's hairdo gets a mention in the Telegraph's fashion column!..

It's always a bonus when a signature look you've been sporting for years - be it a haircut, a hot red lipstick or a penchant for ponchos - suddenly becomes the height of fashion. In the case of Yulia Tymoshenko's trademark, honey-blonde, wrap-over plait, Ukraine's newly appointed acting prime minister couldn't be more of-the-moment.

We're in Moscow. Back in Moscow. Moving from a bigger place into a smaller one, trying to fit all the shit when there's definitely not enough space, is a nightmare - but, thank God, we've survived.

There are moments when I feel like I've never left - partly because we now live five minutes away from where we lived two years ago, and also because our new apartment reminds me of our last Moscow one and is completely different from the place we were renting in St. Pete. The previous Moscow apartment was crazy, though, while this one is somewhat too Soviet - the previous one didn't have a bath tub, for example, and the shower booth was in the kitchen!

Here's a picture from our window, taken in March 2004, when Mishah's brother was living here:



The huge building - the one at Krasnaya Presnya - isn't this close: I zoomed in as much as I could to add some drama...

I was very relieved - if not happy - to leave Moscow at the end of 2002. I was too devastated by what had happened that October - and I still am: the Nord-Ost hostage horror. I was sick of Moscow then. At least this is how I remember it now.

St. Pete is two different cities - in summer, it's one of the most amazing places I've ever been to, but beginning late September, it's the gloomiest thing in the world. The contrast is just too shocking - like nowhere else I've been to. So I'm glad we're leaving now, not in June or July. I almost don't care now.

One thing I keep imagining is how I'm gonna miss St. Pete in a few months - something that seems impossible now. But I know I will.

For me, a love-hate relationship with big cities is the only one possible. Istanbul is an exception - but I've only been there as a tourist. Kyiv is another exception: I love the city as people often love their relatives, infinitely and unconditionally, but after a while I always need to move on, to escape - and somehow I always do...

One thing I love about living in Russia is that it's so close to Ukraine. My worst memory of the one-plus-two years that I spent in the States is not having been able to go back home, not once, either because I couldn't afford it, or because I was scared I wouldn't be tough enough to get up and leave again. I used to have a recurring nightmare in which I'd be in Kyiv, for just a few hours, all my homework and deadlines waiting for me back in the States, and I'd be running around, trying to see everyone and ending up in stupid hi-bye situations...

Moving out tomorrow. No, today - it's Sunday already.

Two apartments in two years in St. Pete; two apartments in two years in Moscow for me, and four in three years for Mishah.

It's always very sad and very exciting to leave, both. And I'm not scared or even nervous anymore. Mishah has been too pensive today, though.

According to the New York Times, The Qatari government is considering selling al-Jazeera TV station, whose worldwide audience ranges from 30 million to 50 million people.

I love the story's last paragraph:

An American official noted that Al Jazeera had not only alienated the United States but had also angered officials in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and many other countries by focusing on internal problems in those nations. "They must be doing something right," he said.

We are sorting through all our papers and other backlogs, trying to get rid of as much shit as possible, and here's a wonderful example of the Russian hotel translation art that I've found in my notes:

DEAR GUESTS!

OUR HOTEL MATISOV DOMIK HAS WASHING, CLEAR, AND AIR SERVICE.

YOU CAN ADRESS TO THE RECEPTION.

GUEST AT A REST HOME.

The last sentence is supposed to mean something like, Enjoy your stay at our hotel. CLEAR means dry cleaning, AIR means ironing.

Located right next to a mental asylum, Matisov Domik is, nevertheless, a rather nice hotel here in St. Pete - we stayed in it during our first reconnaissance trip in early October 2002.

I wanted to write about it when it first appeared, but then I forgot: a Jan. 23 column on Ukraine in the Financial Times - Investors Must Stay Cautious About Ukraine, by Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group and senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. It's for subscribers only now, but I do have it saved, so here're a few excerpts:

But too much optimism is misplaced for Mr Yushchenko or for investors in Ukraine. There's still substantial political risk in the country. Investors should watch closely and remain cautious.

Ukraine's fault lines have not suddenly disappeared. Mr Yushchenko's opponent, former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, still won 44.2 per cent of the popular vote.

Millions of Ukrainians, particularly in the southern and eastern regions of the country, are ethnically Russian, speak Russian as a first language, worship in the Russian Orthodox Church, and support ever closer ties between Kiev and Moscow. Mr Yanukovych is still their man.

They see that Ukrainian nationalists from the west and north of the country have pushed the Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic, and pro-European Mr Yushchenko to power and wonder if their political concerns will now be ignored.

The Financial Times ran a correction on Jan. 26, but I've noticed it only today (that's why I'm writing now) - so it's for subscribers only now as well, and here's a fragment:

Contrary to a report in FT on Monday, president Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church...

Strange that it took them three days to notice the mistake. Strange, also, that a seemingly reputable "political scientist" hasn't bothered to do his homework.

Just for the record, one day after Bremmer's column appeared, Yushchenko said this at a Jan. 24 meeting with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Aleksiy II in Moscow (via Kommersant, in Russian):

I'm a believer and I'll never tell my supporters which church they should attend.

He also told Aleksiy II that, since 2000, the president visits churches of all denominations on Christmas Eve:

Thus we demonstrate our religious tolerance. This is going to be the basis for my policies.

If this isn't enough, Yushchenko is also an economist, which, perhaps, is more relevant than his faith, both for Ukrainians and for the potential foreign investors.

As for the language issue, I wrote about it a few months ago. Here's Yushchenko's quote again, from a Gazeta.ru interview conducted last year:

Unfortunately, the current government hasn't been able to form a clear policy on Ukrainian, Russian or other languages. Our current prime minister [Yanukovych] writes with mistakes in both Russian and Ukrainian. But on the eve of every election, Ukrainian politicians begin to exploit the language issue. Leonid Kuchma used this slogan when he was running for president in 1994: "I'll make Russian the second official state language." So what? Who remembers this promise now?

As for my view on this, I always emphasize that in a democratic state there should be created the conditions for development of various cultural traditions, and this includes the use of different languages. Citizens of any European country are fluent in three or four languages, and we are still being overly dramatic trying to decide in which language we should communicate - in Russian or in Ukrainian? As a result, we speak Russian with mistakes and need a dictionary to speak Ukrainian.

Back to Bremmer's column:

He's already made one smart move: he opted to keep Volodymyr Lytvyn as parliamentary speaker. Mr Lytvyn's agrarian party will be closely aligned with Mr Yushchenko and will provide the new president political inroads with some of those Ukrainians suspicious of his plans.

It's not really up to Yushchenko to decide whether to keep the speaker or not: it's the prerogative of the parliament.

But Ukraine's parliamentary system remains highly fragmented. If Mr Yushchenko takes actions that splinter parliamentary cohesion by nominating hardliner Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister, for example he risks creating instant opposition to his reform programme from parliamentary groups who fear their interests may be brushed aside.

Mr Yushchenko must also be sure he can rein in those on his team who, in the name of fighting corruption, are eager to launch a frontal assault on the oligarchs who profited from the rigged privatisation deals of the Kuchma era. Some in Mr Yushchenko's camp would undoubtedly like to go after Mr Yanukovych and Leonid Kuchma on charges of electoral fraud.

Fighting corruption is unquestionably a worthwhile and necessary goal. But to pick a fight before he's ready to win would be a mistake for Ukraine's new president.

Basically, to make Ukraine safe for foreign investments, Yushchenko is expected to sit still and watch the old guys doing business like nothing's really happened. The only problem with such an approach is that it may not be too safe for Yushchenko himself, considering the readiness of Ukrainians to gather at Maidan when they feel they're being cheated.

Finally, Mr Yushchenko must manage Ukraine's all-important relationship with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin unapologetically campaigned for Mr Yanukovych and has protested what he calls the “western interference” in Ukraine's domestic politics that helped rescue Mr Yushchenko's candidacy from widespread vote-rigging.

Sergei Ivanov, Russian minister of defence, speaking in New York earlier this month, warned his audience of the dangers of exporting revolutions of any colour to the region.

Mr Yushchenko may heighten Russian-Ukrainian tensions if he visits Washington before he calls on Mr Putin, or if he refuses to engage the Russian president in talks on the “single economic space” that Russia hopes to create with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Candidate Yushchenko expressed the fears of millions of Ukrainians that the plan to more closely integrate the economies of the four former Soviet neighbours will separate Ukraine further from the world economy, that it constitutes a thinly veiled attempt by Moscow to restore some of its Soviet-era influence in the region, and that the project could upset Ukraine's plans to join the World Trade Organisation.

But if Mr Yushchenko refuses to even discuss the plan, Russian resentment may burden the new Ukrainian president with a dangerous and determined enemy that enjoys real influence inside his country.

Why couldn't Bremmer wait just one day to make sure that Yushchenko was indeed planning to ignore Putin? On the day the column appeared - the day of the inauguration - it was already known that Yushchenko's first official visit would be to Moscow, so there's no way Bremmer is going to be able to pretend later that it was his expert warning that prevented Yushchenko from making a mess out of the Ukrainian-Russian relationship.

***

It's exhausting enough even without incompetent judgments of someone like Bremmer: there are so many guesses to make in such a short time, and the new ones appear all the time - Who's gonna be nominated for prime minister? Poroshenko? Tymoshenko? Zinchenko? Yavlinskiy? And when will this "who" be nominated? Monday? Tuesday? Sunday? And is Tymoshenko going to survive the vote in the parliament? And is Poroshenko and his party going to vote for Tymoshenko? Et cetera.

Oh, and did I mention that we're moving back to Moscow, not to Kyiv?..

I really, really enjoy following David McDuff down the memory lane - from the Russian Studies department at a British university and on to the Soviet Union, a decade or so before I was born: Going Back 1, Going Back 2 and Going Back 3.

This Sunday, we are leaving St. Petersburg after spending two years here (even though Mishah told me yesterday, with some jealousy, that I had spent at least half a year out of these two in Kyiv). I'm paralyzed with fear - the fear of another move, yet another transition. So, here's a passage from David's account of his summer 1966 trip to the Soviet Union, with a stopover in Leningrad - the passage that has helped me to relax a little, reminding me that I'll always be able to re-visit St. Pete through other people's memories, and through the nicer ones of my own, too:

That summer we didn’t stay in hotels, but slept in a tent we’d taken with us, striking camp at official State campsites whose locations were entered on our visas, together with the obligatory time of arrival at each site. We started with a week in Leningrad, then drove to Novgorod and Kalinin, followed by a week in Moscow, then to Kharkov and Kiev, and finally out of the USSR via Vinnitsa and Chernovitsy, into Romania – four weeks in the Soviet Union in all. In general, at first we were surprised at how “normal” everything seemed – the weather was warm and sunny, the streets and thoroughfares of Leningrad looked much like those of any European city, and it was only when we got out of the car and gazed at the actual texture of the place – the strangely rough, unmodernized surfaces of the roads and buildings, the dust that blew everywhere, the absence of commercial advertising, the old-fashioned look of people’s clothes – that we realized we were in another world from the one we were used to. Even so, during those first days I think we were so pleased to have reached our destination that we didn’t really notice much of this – my memories are mainly of visits to the Hermitage and other museums, to the Petergof Palace and park, of walks along the Neva embankment, and so on. For us, it was almost like being back in Vienna or Copenhagen – or even Edinburgh. We stayed at the campsite at Repino, about 40 km from the centre of Leningrad, on the Gulf of Finland – the pre-Soviet name of the place was Kuokkala, and the whole environment had a thoroughly Finnish atmosphere, with birch and fir trees. We travelled to Leningrad by electric train, and returned in the evenings to the campsite, with its two sections – an international one, for Western tourists, and a “Soviet” one, mainly for Russians and a few tourists from the Baltic states. We soon got used to this division, and the way in which towards evening it usually broke down, when the holidaymakers from the “Russian” side of the site – who slept not in tents of their own, but in large, communal marquees provided by the camp, would come and visit the “Western” side, bringing vodka and fruit which they exchanged for Western cigarettes and items of clothing, especially blue jeans. We also got acquainted with some of the other Western tourists – couples from Canada and Australia in large “dormobiles” and trucks, an intrepid American solo traveller in a VW Beetle, groups of French and Germans in cars, hardly any British at all.

I'm looking forward to David's next installments.