Went to the Soviet Union in the summer of '83.

The trip lasted about five weeks, and took us from Amsterdam to Helsinki. We spent a week or so in places like Munich and Vienna, and then ten days in Romania, and then two and a half weeks in the Soviet Union. It was the first time I went anywhere without my folks, and it made a huge impression on me.

I'll never forget seeing Red Square for the first time, or Dzerzhinsky square, where the statue of the old secret police chief and the Lubyanka, the old KGB headquarters, loomed over the traffic passing by around the circle for decades. Lots of history bustin' out all over the place. Got a good look at my first kalashnikov on that trip, in the hands of a policeman in Bucharest. As soon as the sun started to go down they came out in groups and clamped down on everything. I got to see how the other half lived, back in the good old days of the cold war, and I loved the hell out of it.

Thing is, before I left, I asked my sister what sort of souvenirs she wanted me to bring back. She said, totally serious and with a strait face, "I'd LOVE of of those cool eggs". She was talking about a Faberge egg. I was like, "Are you fucking kidding?", and went on to tell her how much they normally go for. Always a princess, my sis. Anyway, I was reminded of this recently when I saw this story on the web.



LONDON (AP) - A rare enamel-and-gold Faberge egg that had been in the Rothschild banking family for more than a century sold for record-setting $18.5 million at auction Wednesday. The sale of the translucent pink egg topped with a diamond-studded cockerel was a record for a Faberge work of art, Christie's auction house said.

The price also broke the record for Russian artwork, excluding paintings, easily beating the $9.6 million paid for a Faberge egg in New York in 2002. Russian Czar Alexander III commissioned the first of the elaborate eggs from craftsman Peter Carl Faberge as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna. The empress was so enamored of that 1885 piece—an enameled egg with a golden yoke, golden hen, miniature diamond crown and ruby egg inside—that the czar commissioned a new egg every Easter.

After the czar died in 1894, his son Nicholas continued the tradition until the Russian Revolution. Faberge created more than 50 eggs for Russia's imperial family, though not all survive. The Rothschild Faberge Egg is one of no more than 12 such pieces known to have made to imperial standards for private clients.

The Faberge egg sold Wednesday originally was acquired by Edouard Ephrussi, who represented the Rothschild family's oil interests in Baku, in modern Azerbaijan. Ephrussi's sister, Beatrice, gave the piece as an engagement gift to Edouard de Rothschild and Germaine Halphen, who married in 1905. Christie's said it had remained in the family since. The piece was sold to a private Russian bidder after 10 minutes of bidding, Christie's said.

Most recent thing with sis is the soap she's gotten me hooked on. It's called Vinolia. Very posh. She gets me the stuff at Christmas and I run out by about this time in the year. I'm on my last bar, so I go on the web and look it up, thinking I'll just get my own. The friggin' stuff is almost $20 a bar! My sister (ex hippie sex goddess) has a lot of cool knowledge, and has great taste in these sorts of things, but she's also like a drug dealer who hands out free crack to the kids to get them hooked, and then they find out how much the shit costs. Anyway, we found a site where we can get it relatively cheap... $320 for a crate of 72 bars! Hell, it's just money right, but at these prices the soap should blow you, swallow, and wipe you down after. Seriously.