Our Lapta home. We live in the top floor and underneath us is a café and drinks bar not currently rented. Or, more accurately, recently rented again and now undergoing renovations to reopen in April. We meet the two young men who are working on it as we’re returning from the supermarket and stop to chat briefly. One is Russian and the other Israeli, which explains why the conversation we’ve overheard recently from below has been in English, second language of half the world. J asks the Russian where he learned such good English and he says mostly from a former girlfriend in Sofia when his father was posted to Bulgaria. Bit of travel talk and we tell him that we stayed with families in Moscow, his home city as well as St Petersburg. And realise that 1991, the year of the famous August Soviet coup attempt against the Gorbachev government is now more than 30 years ago, and quite probably before he was born. He knows about it of course - but it’s history.