Hi everyone! Let me preface this post by saying that if you don't have a lot of time, don't start reading this! I haven't begun typing yet, but I've had enough adventures in the last 9 days to know that this will be a long one! Also, you may not care to hear about the trip so far, but I tried not to leave anyone out :)
Anyway, the trip has been fantastic!!!! My flight from Detroit to Amsterdam was uneventful and I didn't sleep but I did watch three movies...and I met Wendi in the Amsterdam airport as planned. We tried to get seats together on our flight to Helsinki but they couldn't do it. Well, she randomly got bumped up to first class as we were boarding, and I was sandwiched next to a guy from Atlanta who chatted the entire time...I now know Pete Sampras' birthday, the number of commuters at University of Georgia, and every single car he's had from age 16-38 (all relevant facts, can't you tell!?). When we FINALLY arrived to Helsinki, Wendi was well-rested from having her own ROW in first class, not to mention a gourmet breakfast. Do I seem bitter? I am!
However, no planes had crashed so I was grateful and ready to begin the trip.
Finland is beautiful and actually contains 100,000 lakes. It is actually a huge archipelago. Helsinki is nice, but it didn't impress me as much as the rest of our trip has. However, there is a nice pedestrian area called the Esplanadi, and there is a market by the pier, as well as your typical ornate architecture scattered throughout. Just by chance, we were in town for the weekend of a heavy metal festival, so the younger people were all in leather corsets and all black (naturally) which sort of freaked us out until we found out why! Wendi and I napped while we waited for Marissa, who arrived about three hours later and without her suitcase. We went out and had some dinner and walked around and we were so exhausted that we went to bed before midnight.
Well, at midnight it was still light. And at 4:45 am when the sound of a jackhammer outside of out hostel window woke us up it was light again! It could have been midday it was so sunny. The summer here is unbelievable! You don't need as much sleep because you never feel like it's late and you get so much energy from seeing the sun so much. On the flip side, in January it's only light from 10 am until 3 pm, so I'm not saying it's utopia...but it's pretty damn nice here now!
So on the lovely Sunday that we were woken up at 4:45 by construction, we took a train about two hours west of Helsinki to a town called Turku. It is from the 13th century and is the oldest town in Finland. Formerly, it was the Swedish capital! Turku is a cute town with a nice river and cathedral and parks...we spent the day there and tried the perry siider (pear cider) that they are known for. It's excellent!
Monday was just not my day. We started the day by going to the open air market down by the pier. We got fruit and vegetables and fish. We planned to picnic on Suomenlinna Island, which is a 15 minute ride on a ferry. There is a huge fortress there that was built to be against the Russians, and the whole island is a World Heritage site. Well, as we waited for the ferry, the three of us decided to eat our fish. I wonder why the seagulls decided to attack me and leave Wendi and Marisa alone?! Not only did they steal my fish (which was annoying) but then one landed on my HEAD! It was standing on my head! Aren't seagulls dirty rodents with wings? It was disgusting. And my friends could only laugh and laugh....fast forward about 20 minutes and we were on the upper deck of a ferry, cruising in the sunshine to the island. You couldn't have asked for better weather. I did my best to ignore the toothless drunk man nearby, but it got difficult when he got off of his bench, walked toward me, and GRABBED me! We got into a pushing match, during which time I was half hoping no one had seen him grab me and half hoping everyone did, so that I wouldn't just look like someone who gets in fights with strangers! My friends were, of course, cracking up--they call me a "freak magnet" because if anyone crazy is nearby, they generally approach me! As if the day couldn't get any worse, after spending an amazing day on the island, we went back to Helsinki and decided to hop on a tram to see where it would take us. Enter another drunk man, this time screaming at us that he is "selling beer, cigarettes and medicine for cheap!". I am telling you, Europe is the only place with bilingual drunks! He had to be ejected off of the tram by the driver because he got so rowdy.
Tuesday was the first day we had bad weather (rain) but we didn't care because we spent seven hours on a train to St. Petersburg, Russia. Wendi was the intelligent member of our group who spent part of that time teaching herself Cyrillic. Naturally, being competitive, I had to learn too. I can now read the occasional sign or storefront!
St. Petersburg is the "Venice of the North" some would say. It sits on the mouth of the Neva River on the Gulf of Finland. The city itself is actually made of 44 islands among 50 canals. It was founded by Peter the Great as the capital of Russia in 1703. The city is absolutely incredible! I would go back in a second. There are gorgeous buildings and bridges and churches and palaces as far as the eye can see. And we seriously pounded the pavement all day for four days straight, and STILL didn't see everything!
The one downside to St. Pete is that they have a mosquito problem. Our disgusting fifth floor hostel room with no screens was unbearable without opening the windows, so we used this "mosquito equipment" which looks like what I imagine a Glade plug-in would look like and doesn't work at all. But other than the incessant itching of our arms and legs, we had an amazing time!
We spent two days doing walking tours with a Russian guide. I never do tours because I always picture a woman leading around 40 people with an umbrella waving in her hand. But our tours were small and personal. The first day (Wednesday) we were with "Mike" (Mikhail, I assume) who had such an impeccable British accent I was shocked to find out he was Russian. He toured us around to the artist's area, the Kuznechyy Farmer's Market, the Pushkin statue, the Cathedral of our Savior (colorful Russian domes--I took a million pictures, you'll see them when I get home!), to the Summer Gardens, to Petrograd (home of the Peter and Paul fortress) and then to have some beers! For dinner he directed us to an amazing Georgian restaurant with a nice Barry White CD playing in the background, and we ate with an older couple from Australia about to embark on the Trans-Siberian railroad. It was highly preferable to the Russian restaurant we lunched in where they were playing Abba and a man walked in wearing a t-shirt "celebrating Osama bin Ladin and the 9-11 attacks"...we kept our heads down when we saw him!
On Thursday, Wendi and Marissa went to the Hermitage (an art museum that rivals the Louvre) but I preferred to spend my day walking around the city. I saw the Kozan Cathedral, the Eternal Flame, and the Mikhaylovsky Garden.. It started raining later in the day and so the three of us went to a banya. Apparently the pipes and drainage system in St. Pete haven't been changed since the city was founded (1703) so you can't drink the water, but all the books say if there is one thing you should do, it's go to a Russian bath. Let me tell you, this was an interesting outing.
I've been to the Hungarian baths and they are amazingly huge pools of varying degrees of water, surrounded by beautiful ceramic tiles and sculptures. Not so in Russia! The bathhouse was pretty plain, and basically people just lounge around either in a hot room or in a REALLY hot room. It's like a sauna, but HOTTER than anything I've ever felt--it's 70 degrees celsius. You actually can't breathe when you go in. In the Russian banyas, it is customary to offer and receive a beating with a birch stick. I have to be honest, we didn't do it. I saw other people smacking each other with bunches of birch sticks, but I held myself back ;)
Our Friday tour started out rainy but the weather cleared up and we had a great day. We became friends with three people from the Air Force who are living in Germany and they were really fun. We stopped mid-tour to have some beers and really enjoyed the day with them. Just by chance our group went to Rasputin's old home, and while we were outside a dog started barking at us. A man came out to see what was going on and randomly invited us up into Rasputin's banya! There were half naked men sitting around playing backgammon and no one gave us a second glance. The walls and floors were amazing; very intricately detailed and ornate. I got pictures! Our tour guide Vera said in four years of giving tours she has never been inside. Vera also took us to St. Isaacs, where the domes are covered with gold and 70 slaves died of mercury inhalation when the cathedral was being constructed! I think at this point in the vacation I had gone through about five rolls of film.
Friday night we took an overnight bus to Tallinn, Estonia. Talk about an interesting trip....I think this post is long enough though, so I'll add that to Part II later this week! I'm in Riga, Latvia right now, and my time on this computer is almost up, so let me post this and I promise to write more later this week.
Overall, I'm having a great, great time! Of course I miss everyone, and I would love to have clean clothes as well as a shower that doesn't involve flip flops and walking down a hallway in a towel, but this trip has been amazing fun! I can't wait to develop all my film! Miss you!
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