Category: I’ve been home for about 36 hours now and all I can say is that it’s good to be home. The last three weeks have been amazingly stressful, from breaking the hinge on my laptop and having an offer on a house fall through before I left, to eating and sleeping poorly in St. Petersburg and culminating with a death in the family while at the residency.
Suffice to say, I’ll probably not be writing a whole lot in the next several days/week. While I still have a few highlights worth sharing, overall there isn’t a whole lot of positive I can say about my St. Petersburg experience. Whether those thoughts are ‘real’ or not, it’s how I’ll always remember this trip. In the meantime, it’s great to be back with my wife, in my own bed, eating food I like, in an environment that I can control (as much as anyone is really in control of their life and surroundings).
I can’t remember the source or the exact wording, but there’s a quote that goes something like “The best part about returning to place is not seeing how it has changed, but rather how you have changed.” Perhaps I’ll need to return to St. Petersburg in the future to figure out which part of that quote is true.
Life, 
Sorry to hear about the death. The quote was from Mandela I think, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered”