Sketches from the Surreal Reality of Contemporary Saint Petersburg.

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"Saint Petersburg was built by a madman. The people who voluntarily stay there, including myself, are also mad: initially, Peter the Great had to force people to settle in this uninhabitable city."

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Thus says Marente de Moor about the city where she has lived and worked for years. The grey politics of the Moscow Kremlin have no hold over Saint Petersburg, the world's northernmost metropolis. In her humorous sketches of everyday city life, the author reveals that behind the reality of ongoing economic crisis and organized crime lies a madness that governs daily life: bears live in buses on the streets, clergy train fascists to become war monks, and plumbers are best paid in vodka. That, by the way, is about the only thing readily available.