It was 1990. Things were changing crazy fast in the Soviet Union. There weren’t a lot of tourists in Leningrad and there certainly wasn’t much infrastructure for us. Did we stay in a hotel that was mostly brown? Was the dining room full of hookers in the early evening? There was brown bread for breakfast, sour tasting, and I had to navigate a lot of rubbery meat.  I was hungry a lot of the time because I’m mostly a vegetarian.… continued…