Pióro

Friday the 13th, at about two in the morning, we crossed the Lithuanian border and finally arrived in Poland.

We were the only ones on the bus whose passports were closely scrutinised and collected. I find it hard to believe that the stamping of our two lowly passports resulted in the incredibly long wait, which I think can be accredited to infamous Polish efficiency. All in all though, a pleasant border crossing. We spent it chatting with a nice Italian traveller we had met at the Old Town Hostel in Vilnius. He’d been to Poland already, where he was dumbfounded by what he perceived to be a national interest in the Italian language. According to him, they all want to learn Italian. Shit, maybe learning English is on its way out. But what the hell do the Polish want to learn Italian for? As our fellow traveller said himself, it’s only spoken by about 40 million people world-wide, and they’re pretty much all in Italy! English? Try about 460 million! Come on, they’ve got to still want to learn it.

Ok, I’m not really worried.

So, have I mentioned we’re in Gdańsk?

It’s beautiful.

Been to the Solidarity Monument and museum. Bought a T-shirt.

No really, I did.

It’s cool.

(check out pics 498 and 499 … they should be up soon)

Bootcamp (Link no longer active.)

First Round of Competition (Link no longer active.)

The Championships (Link no longer active.)

When I got on the bus to go to Air Guitar bootcamp, I was surprised at what I found. There were about six others on the bus with me and only one to two others had any experience playing the air guitar. But all were working on a story. Jack from the Times, who actually turned out to be a pretty mean air strummer, was working on a feature. Marian working on one article for three German mags: Maxim Germany, some other national monthly and a girls magazine. Two days later I did a full on photo shoot for Marian’s photographer in a parking lot in Oulu. There was one of those big umbrella-flash thingys on a stand and I struck air guitar poses as the camera man circled around me. I only hope I can get my hands on that German girls magazine! Andrew was the other Canadian. He had a documentary crew following him around too. The NFB must be in our blood. There was also Cedric and Kriston from Vice. On the way to bootcamp, we had to pick up Ronan from German TV at the Oulu airport. At this point I wasn’t feeling too keen on this whole bootcamp thing. Seemed like a whole lot of navel gazing by journalists. The first big event of bootcamp consisted of a few lectures. Oikku, the world’s first ever Air Guitar champ, gave us general trips, which had to be translated from Finnish into English for us. Then Zac Monro, then current and once again reigning world champ from London, came to give us a talk on some of the more wider social aspects of air guitar. Right behind him came the press. Yes, there were even more press covering this thing, including Martha, Scott and Mike. That’s right, they came to the camp with all-access press-passes hanging around their necks. They were all happily drunk on the press-power. So the bootcampers air guitared for the press. I got some tips from Zac which I quickly forgot. Zac even roped Martha into a air guitar performance. She was wicked! I think Mike has it all on film. Geoff, you’ll have to forgive me, but I spoke a bit to the other Canadian docu-team. I was intoxicated by the attention.

After the media circus, the bootcampers were taken to some rustic Finnish digs. We had a full on traditional sauna. It’s not often I can say I got naked and sweaty with a bunch of strange guys. Jumping into the Baltic was intense. A wicked party. I think this event and the following days made most bootcampers a little more serious about the art of air guitar. It was weird, but for the next three days we’d all (bootcampers, other players, the press, the posse) be talking very seriously about the practice. More on that later.

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.

Okay, Martha, Mike, Scott and I have been in this quiet little northern university town for a week, and let me tell you, it has been a huge party. From 21 to 23 August, I could make believe I was a rock star.

Here’s the long and the short of it: I was eliminated in the first round. This meant that I could not compete in the final for the title of Air Guitar World Champion. But, frig, let me tell you sometime about how much fun I had. Unfortunately that blog will have to wait. The posse is headed for St. Petersburg. Should be crazy.

It was the strangest thing.

We were heading north from Berlin on a 3 hour flight, and somehow we landed in Canada!

How is this possible? Surely you are joking? I can hear you now, sceptical and unbelieving, but I tell you, the senses do not lie!

What are these trees I see, these mighty pines and birches… Europe doesn’t have trees like these… but I know them well.

What are these smells, the raw wilderness, the fresh cold air of a late summer morning… this cannot be Europe.

And the people, sure I can’t make any sense of the sounds coming from their mouths, but they have that same cold politeness that I know only too well.

So after landing in this strange doppelganger of a home land, Matt and I set out to find a place to rest our heads. The first step would be to attempt communication with one of our strange speaking brethren… sure enough, they spoke perfect English. Finding a room for the night was not that easy. We must have called every hostel in town, only to be rejected each and every time. We finally had to settle on staying in the burbs for one night, and to make a reservation in the city for the next night. We hopped on a bus, headed just a little west from the airport, and got to the suburban town that would be our hermitage for the evening, and what do you know… it’s Kanata. Yup, the same neat, quiet streets, the same corner stores, and above all, the same bored teenagers. Thank god we were only staying one night. We got up bright and early the next day to take the train into the city. It’s a lovely city, the nation’s capital, many nice museums, beautiful buildings. It’s small too, and easy to walk everywhere. We had a very pleasurable 10 day stay in that city, which I could have sworn was Ottawa, but they keep telling me was Helsinki, Finland.

Here’s the big up-date on our humble travels. I did mention in a previous blog that we were in Vienna, Austria, but let me tell ya how we got there.

From Istanbul, we wanted to go to Budapest. However, we didn’t fancy the train ride through Bulgaria (where I think we needed visas, not a good thing to find out at the last minute!) and Romania, which would have taken roughly 33 hours. Some Swedish lads we met in Rome did this trip. They said it’s hard to make friends with the Bulgarian border guards. So we flew. The cheapest flight on Turkish Air was to Vienna. Talk about culture shock when we landed. We left a city of 16 million, where everyone wanted to sell us a carpet. There were always calls of “Yes, please. Yes, please. Hello my friend,” as we walked down the street. When we got to Vienna, it seemed like a ghost town, where no one j-walks (Martha did her best to teach them.) Still, Vienna was cool. Big on the haute-culture tip.

Then it was off to Győr, Hungary. Smallish tourist town with some industry around the edges. The cheapest digs we could find the town were at the university campus. The student dorms were bleak, in that crumbly Cold War kitsch kinda way. Many vandals tried to brighten up the place with graffiti. The hallways were barely lit and herds of uniformed Hungarian cleaning ladies would cruise the halls every morning. Martha and I spent one morning trying to dodge them on the way out. There is only so much smiling and nodding you can do as some cute little old lady babbles in a language that isn’t related to anything else in Europe.

Budapest next. There we scored a sweet place. It was a full on flat, complete with shared kitchen and bathroom. We didn’t have to do much sharing because we didn’t have neighbours for most of the stay. In Budapest we celebrated two months of travelling. We were warned about the two month mark. Friends said that’s when things start to get rough. Well, they were right. Both Martha and I were tired and grumpy through most of our stay in Budapest. Sometimes a city can totally suffer at the hands of your mood. Not Budapest. Our flat also had the Cartoon Network. We saw Kate, Martha’s sister, who was taking advantage of all those German holidays. It was cool seeing a familiar face, if only for a short time.

Off to Berlin on an over-night train. Everything got locked up before we fell asleep! Berlin is über-cool. It’s got such a good vibe. Even the street lights ooze history. We saw the Brandenburg Scaffolding (the Gate is covered up for repairs, the scaffolding is a once in a lifetime thing!), bits of the old Berlin Wall and Men in Black II in the new Sony Centre. Our beds were in old East Berlin at a gigantic hostel, perfect for those who need to hear a lot Bob Marley or hang out with affected thrift-store fashionistas. Our time in Berlin was divided between seeing the sights and trying to arrange things for St. Petersburg (which is still going on here in Finland). We found out the hard way that travel agents actually know very little about travelling. “We only do plane tickets.” is a common response. Most of the info we needed we found (surprise!) on the Interweb. So, when our time wasn’t wasted by silly plane ticket agents, we were surfing (sadly not blogging). They did get us a cheep flight to Helsinki though.

Yuppers, the pics are back. Check it, this time with some narration, so you’ll have a better idea of what you are lookin’ at. Enjoy.

Oops. Not likin’ some of the “features” (read: restrictions) that come with Internet Cafe hopping. I was trying to tune up the new page with all the new pics and, well, now it’s not working. As soon as I find a more accommodating Internet Point, things should be fixed. Stay tuned.

In the interests of speed and time, we’ve put up a whack of photos in an uncategorised fashion. That means no witty commentary from us. Check this entry later. We’ll provide a few more deets, when we got the time. Until then, go to Pics and take the link at the top of the page.