Thirteen minutes to midnight here in the former Leningrad.

It's an oddly familiar place, actually.  Lots of imperious public buildings, national galleries devoted to the arts, and large green squares devoted to dead warriors.  Took a while, but then it was obvious: it's a lot like Washington, D.C. 

With one large exception.  Shortly before midnight as I write this, it's still bright enough outside to read a book, assuming you have decent eyesight and at least a 12-point font.

They call the evening here during this time of year "White Nights," and with good reason.  It never actually gets fully dark.  The sun goes down, but just in a peek-a-boo way, hiding just below the horizon for a few hours before popping back up a bit after 3 am or so.

The big activity here in all the extra daylight seems to be dressing up in a boxy sport jacket (for men) or a too-tight outfit possibly intended for a pygmy chimpanzee but certainly not a full-grown human female (for women), smoking many cigarettes while looking bored, and then wandering down to the Neva at about 1:30 am to watch the drawbridges being raised one after another.

You get the feeling the acting-bored part isn't exactly a pose.

Although everything I just said is completely unfair to a city which has managed for many generations and under some of the worst conditions imaginable to remain an important center for the fine arts: within a ten-minute walk of this here coffee house, you can find important landmarks in literature, music, theater, dance, and the wearing of large Italian sunglasses while scowling bitterly.

This last art may not be fully appreciated yet in the rest of the world, but the folks walking around Nevsky Prospekt are clearly committed to pioneering and popularizing the form.  You get the feeling that people from the suburbs may even be taking night classes.

You don't really notice your body clock being affected by all the extra light.  Not at first.  Then one day you're walking along at about three in the afternoon and you notice that all the stores have closed, nightclubs are spewing pulsating music, it's almost sunrise the next day, and that you've got about as much time sense as your average UFO abductee.

Which is why I'm sitting in a coffee shop at six minutes after midnight, feeling perfectly alert despite having walked enough miles to personally re-enact Napoleon's retreat to Paris.  And in a little while I'm planning to saunter down to the Neva, slap on a pair of designer shades, and give total strangers a withering look of disdain.  If someone even tries to talk with me, I'll be entirely too important to even notice.

Which is another way this place feels like a lot like Washington.