"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow" - Leo Tolstoy

I had the immense pleasure of attending a wedding this weekend. The lead roles? A girl with a heartbreaking past, yet with enough heart left to be one of the most wonderful people I know. Her fiance; a golden retriever character. Or that's as much as I could gather from about 7 hours in his presence.
The setting? It's seen War & Peace, it's listened to Anna Karenina's torturous life story. I's residents have been starved, frozen and hailed as heroes. It has changed it's name three times in the last century. A city that remains one of the greatest love stories of the modern age. Something only Tolstoy could have summed up.

St Petersburg was having a particularly warm February - I only needed two woolen jumpers.

The wedding was pleasantly un-Russian (aka. paid very little tribute to My Big Fat Greek Wedding). Minimal dancing, no one passing out drunk, relatives with only moderately eye-rolling speeches, only a few cheesy gift-boxes. The dress, to my immense relief, was absolutely gorgeous.

The city feels like it's still breathing the glory of it's history. Of course, visiting for exactly 2 days, I had little chance to sample the nightlife and youth scene (how it pains me to use that phrase) but which I am assuredly told is thriving. If Moscow is the daring, glamorous younger sister that goes out and attracts all the attention; St Petersburg is the older sister, the dreamer and the poet.
It's astounding how big the city is, for a relatively small population. The streets were built to plan and encompass a maze of canals and islands. It's often called the Venice of the North; it too is sinking under our feet. A strange and charming fury; the strength of history and the frail, sad beauty of what it's walls have lived through. 

I caught the bouquet that evening. But too late, I think I'm already in love.

"Charity creates a multitude of sins" - Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's plays drew a rainbow of characters, whose opinions were so dramatic and varied that one could not possibly ascribe such thoughts to the man himself. Or at least I hope not, otherwise he would have led a very bleak existence.

Sadly, we know this to be the truth. Coming from the man who was sent to the workhouse at the age of seven, whose mother was taken into a mental institution when he was nine, and who spent years in prison under a multitude of charges - you'd think he'd be a little more sympathetic towards those in dire need, even through the mouthpeices of his characters.

Last week, a good friend of mine and myself took part in a charity event called Jailbreak. The idea is deceptively simple: 36 hours to get as far away from our uni without spending any of our own money.
The key phrase here is 'our own money'.
I'm sure that, back in the good old days when people were more noble/smart/kind/better, they hitchiked and trudged and struggled through the snowy season to emerge somewhere a little more interesting. What do we do now? We beg, barter and annoy people for money.. and use it to buy plane tickets.

Admittedly, this probably works to get people further (one group got to Sydney this year, pretty mind bending stuff), but those thousands of pounds given to airline companies?
Not once over the course of those hours did we bend the truth, exxagerate and weasel our way out of awkward explanations. We never lied, but that speaks not of our moral victory, but more of those kind donations which came from the rushed, the bored and the occupied. Those that would rather throw a few coins in the listen to our frozen, desperate pitches.

In the end, we'll collect more money than we spent (which, admittedly, got us far further than we could have hoped for), but does the end justify the means?

We returned exhausted, dirty and poor, but elated. Shame to think those folks in Sydney have get right on that plane and come back the next day.