Our flight stops off at somewhere called Riga, and I’m sitting here thinking’ Riga, where the hell is Riga? When we did arrive at Riga we got lost looking for our Russian transfer, and the staff were shouting our names over the PA to get our arses there and we finally found where we were supposed to go. The plane to Russia was a 40 seater with two propellars. At the Airport, Arkady was there to meet us.
He took us for coffee at 2 am and then to a hostel that reminded me of a commune I was in when I was younger.
Ade introduced his language tool to people at the hostel, something I have named the Welsh Computer (Ade is Welsh). This is a piece of Welsh slate and a stick of chalk.
Wake up first day in Russia, Ade is photographing everything in the room. The place we stayed in has a bordello above it and you can watch cctv footage of whose going up and coming back down. St. Petersburg is a very beautiful city. It is very big and everything looks very old. We used the metro for the first time, the escalator goes down for ages and all the architecture in the station and the design of the trains is very classical. The concentration is on design rather than what is practical. Travelling round is very difficult as the Russian alphabet has 36 letters and half of them are completely alien to me (no English translation here) Walking around the centre we saw someone selling kittens in the street…
…and a couple of young lads doing acrobatics in front of cars in the road
Our first meal was in a traditional pancake shop.Ade ordered a couple of salads. He was telling me how nice they were and that I should try them myself. When I told him they had chicken in he seemed a bit surprised, and he suddenly got ill. He says meat makes him ill, I wonder if he would have been ill if I had never told him there was meat in it.
about Koe to Kotoba to Kokoro noHeya (the Room of Voices Words and Hearts=Cocoroom)Non Profit Organization Cocoroom have made efforts to introduce social issues to the public and we have specialized our activities in art. In our headquarters Cocoroom located in Shin-Sekai region, Osaka in western Japan, we have unique guests everyday such as artists, homeless people, handicapped people, people Not in Employment, Education or Training, and people who have difficulty to be socialized. 
Cocoroom has been the place we can talk face by face, and that have created a lot of interesting art projects under the question “How can we become socially recognized?” Each of those movements are small, however, we hope it would give each person a warm embrace of heart to achieve wisdom of life.
And the painting… 
