The city of St. Petersburg is definitely putting effort into improving its image. With a little help from the Almighty, who has blessed the city with an unprecedented heat wave, St. Petersburg is buzzing with a warm and friendly feeling. Some irrevocably skeptical residents, however, suspected that this unnatural weather was achieved at their expense. They were convinced that authorities trying to accommodate the Goodwill Games dipped into the city budget to seed and disperse the clouds that are normally undetachable from the St. Petersburg skyline. Mayor Anatoly Sobchak was even forced to come up with a special statement assuring taxpayers that not a single kopeck of the 300 million rubles (about $150,000) that indeed had been allocated for the purpose has been spent.


The most frequent subject of conversation is the excessive heat. Temperatures of 28 to 30 degrees Celsius -- nothing unusual for Americans, French or Italians -- are a real tribulation for pale St. Petersburg northerners. Outdoor cafes, which have mushroomed all over the city in the past few weeks, offer a welcome respite to sweating city dwellers and tourists. Hardly any offices and even fewer apartments are air-conditioned, and open windows at night let in a flood of merciless stinging beasts.


Sunday, the peak of the Games as well as Russian Navy Day, offered an array of entertainment. Retired seamen and mariners, who usually spend the holiday terrorizing the city with their drunken escapades, were given a chance to release their energy in a staged storming of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The celebrations continued with a full-scale Navy parade on the Neva river and climaxed with ubiquitous fireworks.


The bohemian art community, to whom simple pleasures like a Navy parade and fireworks are alien, entertained itself aboard the Stubnitz, a German art ship anchored on the Vasilievsky Island embankment. Once a regular freighter, the ship was redone to function as a traveling cultural center/gallery/night club. The long-awaited virtual reality technology aboard the ship did not quite live up to expectations at its premiere, and the crammed hold space was used mostly for partying and dancing.


The Mariinsky Theater, at the height of the cultural season, found itself in a sad yet comical situation. In anticipation of ballet-hungry wealthy Western tourists, the theater boosted its prices from a relatively cheap 10,000 rubles per ticket to an unreasonable 100,000. As a result, on the prestigious Goodwill Games nights, the house was two-thirds empty. Desperately trying to hide the gaps, the theater even tried giving tickets away. It apparently did not help much. Principal Conductor Valery Gergiev, infuriated over the management's pricing policy, refused to conduct the performance to an empty hall and passed the task to another conductor.