A hustle here and a hustle there....

These two were belting out the songs in a street just off Nevskiy Prospekt in St Petersburg this evening where even now, after midnight, it still isn't completely dark. It's on the same latitude as Helsinki so it's a bit colder than it's been in our Surrey garden the past couple of weeks.

Coming through the airport I was told by the border officer to go back behind the red line and she called over a uniformed man in a green pancake hat. "It says in your visa that you are woman," he said, then went away with my passport leaving me nonplussed, humming a Lou Reed song and touching up my nail varnish. It was enough to bring me out in a hot flush!

I waited and waited until finally he returned with the old visa cancelled under an official stamp and a new visa restoring my masculinity.

I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I came away with a different point of view.

So, fun and games in the Baltic. Some more here.