Pióro

Those of you who have kept a journal before can commiserate with this scenario. You’ve been busy, you’ve been having fun or you just haven’t picked up a pen in a long time. Of course, the whole time you’ve been ignoring your duties as a scribe, you are finding more and more things you want to set down. This is called ‘journal jam,’ where you don’t know if you should start all your entries like “Twelve days ago, we did…” or just write about your breakfast that morning. Well, I’m suffering from that and the more contemporary ‘blog clog.’ So, here’s my compromise: try to sum up all that is post-Finland stuff now and relate air guitar madness when I have the chance.

So, Martha, Mike, Scott and I chilled in Oulu even after the Air Guitar Champs had ended. We went to a full on rave at the youth centre. We danced and screamed. I was told jokingly to be quiet, this was a library. The person who scolded me was the director of Freestyle, a movie about hip-hop from LA. He told me to come to the show tomorrow, but like, it was 4am already, like we’d even make it. The rest of our northern Finland daze were spent biking around town on low-riders with coaster-brakes and cooking sausages over a fire.

Down to Helsinki for the final paper-work for Russia and then, bam, we landed in St. Petersburg. This town was next level. Thankfully, we had a language book and had our Cyrillic alphabet down. If we didn’t have those essentials, things would have been even more difficult. There was a good amount of English in the city, but not a lot and especially not at the central visa registry. In Russia, you have to get invited to enter the country and you have to register once you get in. Usually, big name hotels can take care of all of that for you. We budget traveller have to do things a bit differently. We found some web site that e-mailed us our invitation. That was easy. But registering, that was a bit trickier. Thankfully, we met a wonderful girl our age who was bilingual. Let’s call here the Angel. She helped up wade through some of the bureaucracy at the main visa registry. In the end we found out that we couldn’t register with the main registry, but we had to track down the office of the people who invited us. Not a big problem especially compared to one woman we met. Her mother lived in St. Petersburg and was dying. But the daughter, who spoke excellent French and was born is St P, was having trouble getting permission to stay in the city to see her mom. A Brit and his wife found out they had to go to Moscow to register. The Brit used a method of communication he liked to call the American but we now call the Asshole, that’s where you just yell really loudly in English until you get what you want. That didn’t work in registry.

Grocery shopping was a challenge too. We had a hard time finding a Euro/N. American style of grocery store. You know, like you bring all your stuff to the counter and you don’t have to speak to anyone if you don’t want to. The first place we found was a get-in-line and order from the counter affair. We split up and all did our share of pointing, grunting and nodding.

With stamped visas in our pockets and water bottled by Pepsi in our back-packs, we set off to explore the city. St. Pete’s is hype. Kinda dirty, but big, intense and the parts that weren’t covered up in scaffolding were beautiful. Mike and I went clubbing one evening. That was crazy. Fancy-shmancy people in the line so, we hosers were getting passed by even though we were ‘next’ for half an hour. I was teaching Mike how to say “I don’t speak Russian.” in Russian and by the time those words left our mouths, we were in. Mike thinks we were taken for New Yorkers or something equally hip. So faster than you can say “abracadabra,” we were on the dance-floor grooving to throbbing beats and enveloped in more dry-ice smoke than is legal to pump into a Canadian stadium.

We did the high-culture thing too. All of us saw Onegin, the Pushkin novel turned opera by Tchaikovsky. We ate at a restaurant that catered to the local intelligencia around 1910. We saw Dovstoyevsky and Tchaikovsky’s graves and drank 12% beers in the subways. That is high culture!

Now Mike and Scott have gone their separate ways, well, I think they are both in London now. For Martha and I, St Petersburg just didn’t seem right without them. We left for Tallinn, Estonia. For me the border crossing was disappointingly easy. No hassles, nothing. Just a long delay at the duty free. Tallinn is a big old theme park for Americans. There are tons of tour groups. Compared to St Pete’s, this is Disneyland. The best way to see Tallinn’s old town is right after you get off the red-eye express. You can wander around delirious and sleep-deprived and it’s just you, the old town and little old gnomish ladies with their wig bristle brooms.