2010: A Russian Odyssey

Travel Week adventures

I’m finally back in St. Petersburg, and it’s definitely a good feeling to be back. It’s just nice to be in a familiar area after about a week outside my “comfort zone” (I use this term loosely because Petersburg can hardly be considered inside any comfort zone). I’ve written a lot about my week’s journeys, and I tried to break it up with photos to not completely bore you…

We caught the night train at 11:00 on Thursday March 25 to Moscow from Moskovskiy vokzal in Petersburg. I knew that the trip wouldn’t be too pleasant – nothing about a seven hour night train appeals to me. I roomed with three others in a cramped coupe and ended up trying to sleep around 2:30, fully knowing that I would get no sleep and would end up having a loooong day in Moscow. I just don’t sleep well on transport.

When we got into Leningradskiy vokzal in Moscow, the first thing we did was drive to our hotel. I think it took about five minutes on that bus for me to fall in love with Moscow. It’s a difficult love to explain because the city is really dirty, its pedestrians are thuggish, and there’s very little culturally historical about it. All of that refreshed me though, Moscow was a great contrast to Petersburg, and it came at the perfect time.

The architecture was one of my favorite parts – some people were calling it socialist realism, I’m not really sure if that’s an official term but it fits. Tall, concrete, gothic-looking buildings tower over the Moscow landscape, seven of which are topped with red stars. Almost every official building has hammer and sickle and star emblems decorating the outer walls. I’m not sure if these kinds of things were too expensive to remove, but a lot from the USSR remains in Moscow and it gives the city an extremely soviet feel. Statues to Marks, Engels, and Lenin scattered throughout the city also contribute to that.

After breakfast at the Holiday Inn we took a city tour in the bus. We went to the typical tourist stop of Red Square and some other spots like Swan Lake and Moscow University. The university’s main building is amazing – it’s this freaky star-topped building sitting on a hill overlooking all of downtown Moscow. I wouldn’t mind going to school there.

After the bus tour we had some free time and decided to spend it exploring the city and its insanely extensive metro system. We took the metro to Oktyabrskaya station, where a statue of Lenin would most definitely have to be standing (and it was). After that we went to a Georgian restaurant for dinner, where I had some great dolma!

The next day in Moscow was dedicated to a visit to the Kremlin. We went inside the Kremlin’s walls and got tours of its various buildings including the church where all Russian tsars were crowned. The Kremlin is surrounded by red star-topped buildings, so that of course made my day.

After the tour and a trip to a Russian art museum, we rested up at the hotel. Although our flight to Warsaw was on Sunday morning, the cheapest and easiest way for Dan, Zoltan, and I to get to the Moscow airport required us to leave the hotel at 11:00pm Saturday night. Our flight was at 7:00am so you can imagine the wonderful night we had in the airport. Luckily Daylight Savings Time got rid of an hour for us. Sunday morning we got onto our plane all glazy-eyed, and our official travel week began.

I spent most of our one hour forty minute flight to Riga, Latvia asleep. The only thing I remember was the stewardess waking me up to ask something in Russian. I was so out of it all I could bring myself to say was “Ya ne ponimayu” (I don’t understand) and with that I ended up with a disgusting sandwich in front of me. I was still in a daze when the food was being taken away because I spilled black tea all over my jeans. When the guy next to me came back from the bathroom, he sat in a different row.

We landed in Riga and regret quickly sank in for me. The view from above was so depressing. On the tarmac we were poured on by rain. I was imagining everybody else in the warmth of Greece and Egypt and immediately asked myself what I was doing here. Luckily we found a pizza shop where we bought a monstrous pepperoni pizza at 9:30am – that kept me out of spiraling depression for a bit. In the airport terminal we met a Polish guy named Adam who was really interested in telling us everything about Warsaw, including its nightlife and women. That wasn’t the last of Adam though…

After picking up our luggage and getting some Polish zlotychs from the currency exchange, we walked outside the airport with absolutely no idea what to do next. All of a sudden Adam shows up and decides to get us to where we need to go. We violated the first rule of mothers all over the world and followed this guy. We got on a bus that would go to the center of the city – when I asked Adam how we pay for the bus, he said that if someone asks for my ticket I should speak to them in Spanish and they’d go away. The look on Dan’s face at that moment was priceless, we were all realizing that Adam was a very weird person. After the free bus ride, we took a free tram ride and a free metro ride. I asked Adam to help us get to the train station so we could buy tickets to Vilnius – we wanted to go to our hostel too, but we had enough sense to lie to him in the airport and say we didn’t have a hostel yet. During our free metro ride, after Adam called the accordion player of a minority ethnicity a thief, we decided it was time to ditch Adam. I suggested to Dan that we jump out of the metro car at the wrong station right before the doors close, but there’s no way we would have pulled that off correctly, and Zoltan probably would’ve been stuck with Adam still. When we got out of the metro and Adam had no idea where he was going, I told him we didn’t want to follow him anymore. He didn’t seem to distraught about it, he completely understood and walked off into the distance alone. We decided he was most definitely a serial killer.

The sense of freedom we felt when Adam left was pretty sad, we were acting like slaves. Later upon reflection though, we decided that without this serial killer we would’ve had no idea how to get to our hostel. At least he showed us to the metro – I already knew our hostel’s stop and we got there in 15 minutes. This was the first hostel experience for all three of us, and we were all really impressed. The hostel was very clean, the staff was extremely accommodating, and it was perfectly located in the center of Warsaw.

After settling down in our room we went out for a walk to some monuments and then lunch. At lunch we quickly realized how absurdly cheap this country was. The American dollar goes far in Poland, especially for food! After lunch we walked around the old part of town, all squares and cobblestone streets. It was Palm Sunday, so there were a lot of celebrations going on. We essentially kept exploring until dinner, which was none other than Polish sausage! The terrible airport sleep earlier made us exhausted at this point, so we got back to the hostel and slept for 12 hours.

When we woke up after that glorious sleep, it was Monday and we had some business to get down to. First we had to buy our ticket out of Warsaw for Wednesday and we also wanted to take a day trip to the city of Krakow. We rented bikes from the hostel and set out to the train stations. The station that sells tickets to Vilnius was part of a district called Praga. I was a bit unimpressed by Praga, I was expecting an old-style unrestored district but it looked more like the slums, and I was glad we didn’t get the hostel in that area. Getting the train tickets wasn’t too difficult. Although all the young waitresses in Poland speak English very well, the train ticket cashiers are generally older women who don’t know English. Their Russian is decent though, and that’s how we got by. Their accents and mix of Polish words were different enough even for me to recognize. For instance, instead of saying “tri” for “three,” most would say “tshi,” which is Polish. They also spoke in broken Russian – one asked “What time is it right now?” instead of asking what time we wanted the train. I could sense a general animosity from a couple of those cashiers when they were forced to speak Russian, we tried to stick to English as much as possible.

With all of our train tickets purchased, we spent some more time exploring the city on our bikes. We stopped at the old town square for some frozen yoghurt and to listen to some guy playing steel drums. At night we decided to be very unoriginal and eat at the same Polish restaurant for dinner, but this time we brought along our roommate Lee, a South Korean university student studying abroad in England who lost his passport his first hour in Warsaw.

Early Tuesday morning we set out on the four hour train ride to the city of Krakow, which is far south of Warsaw close to Poland’s border with Slovakia. We just wanted to spend a day there, and it was a good decision because the amount of things to do there were limited – one day was perfect. We ate lunch in the main square outdoors, a concept we had almost forgot. This was the best meal we had in a long time, and we savored it in the middle of that square in the 65 degree sunlight.

The rest of the day was spent exploring Krakow. It’s the epitome of a small European city: cobblestone streets, old looking buildings, castles on hills. There is some fascination with a dragon story in Krakow, so all the souvenirs were dragon-themed and there was a statue on the river bank that breathed fire every couple minutes. While sitting on the river’s short it hit us… we were sitting on grass! Something we hadn’t seen in a while. We left Krakow the same day around 8:30pm and spent our last night in Warsaw.

We were all sort of dreading Wednesday. There’s only one train that goes from Warsaw to Vilnius without passing through the country of Belarus, which has the most ridiculous visa requirements in Europe, so we had to take it. We left Warsaw at 7:00am and arrived in Vilnius at around 7:00pm… it was quite a journey. Luckily our hostel was close enough to the train station that we didn’t need a serial killer or any illegal free transportation to get there. We set our things up in the room and quickly got out of there because our time in Vilnius was very limited.

Like Warsaw (and every other city we visited), Vilnius had a pretty extensive old town area that turned out to be the most interesting to explore. We had dinner at a Lithuanian cuisine restaurant – the food was so good (and cheap), I got zeppelins which are meat-stuffed dumplings covered in curd. At dinner everyone around us was speaking an accented Russian, and it became clear that the Russian ethnic population and influence in Lithuania was definitely higher than in Poland. Our waiter was switching from flawless English at our table to perfect Russia at the next table to native Lithuanian behind the counter. The language proficiency of people in service jobs in the Baltic states is pretty amazing. They all know their country’s language but also had to learn Russian in the USSR and now English in order to communicate and deal with tourists and the rest of Europe. I was just very impressed that our waiter was going around memorizing orders in three different languages.

The twelve hour journey that day took all the life out of us, and we went back to the hostel to rest up. This hostel wasn’t as good as the one in Warsaw (will anything ever be?!?) but it was still decent. We woke up really early in order to see more of Vilnius in the daytime because our bus out of there was at 10:00am. The three of us hiked up to this castle on the hill and got a great view of the two sides of Vilnius – old town and downtown. The downtown area came as a surprise, we hadn’t seen any trace of a skyscraper until we got up that mountain and looked the other direction. After that little side-trip we grabbed breakfast and head over to the bus station, where we waited for our Eurolines bus to Riga.

The capital cities of the Baltic countries are so close that there aren’t any trains running between them, just buses. Our bus from Vilnius to Riga was an easy four hour day trip, and we arrived in Latvia around 2:00pm. The poor Riga weather that we got at the airport a couple days before was still lingering, and it was raining our entire time in the city. We decided earlier that we didn’t want to spend a night in Riga, which turned out to be a great idea. It could have been a spring break time for these countries we visited, but Riga was totally empty. There wasn’t a single tree with leaves on it, and the rain made everything feel pretty somber. I’m sure Riga is beautiful in the summertime, this was a wrong time to visit. Luckily we found a great cafeteria to eat at and kill most of our time in the city.

Our bus ride out of Riga was technically the next day, but at 1:25am. Night bus: bad idea. Not because of safety but because sleeping on a bus should never be a voluntary choice. Also problematic was that we were set to arrive in Tallinn, Estonia at 6:30am and would not be allowed to check into our hostel until the afternoon. But we went through with it anyway, of course. We arrived in Tallinn just in time to see the sun rise over the port on the Finnish Gulf. The hostel was a very short walk from the port and as we guessed beforehand the room wasn’t ready. We left all of our things at the hostel and went out in search of breakfast.

The most interesting part of Tallinn is, you guessed it, the old town! The problem is this place is apparently a big party city and nobody is awake to serve you breakfast at 7:00am. People were going home from the hundreds of bars and gentlemen’s clubs while we were out looking for a place to eat. The majority of Friday was spent exploring old town and dining like kings. Estonia was definitely the most expensive country out of the four we visited though, so our kingly meals came at a price. For dessert we found a pancake house that served humongous Russian “bliny” with delicious toppings. Zoltan is a blin-maniac and he was radiating happiness the entire time we were at this pub. He had one blin with chocolate sauce and ice cream and vowed that if we came back the next day he would order two. Dan and I really wanted to see his stomach explode, so we took him up on it.

Day two in Tallinn, and our last full day of traveling, was spent with some more exploring and a couple of museum visits. The map we had directed us to the Museum of Occupations, which was a museum dedicated to the history of Nazi and Soviet occupation of Estonia. The map promised a six meter tall statue of Stalin in the museum, and that’s the real reason why I wanted to go – but it lied, there was no Stalin to be found. The museum was still interesting – Estonians really hated the Soviet Union, so much that they consider Nazi occupation a better period in their history. The basement of the museum was a communist statue graveyard, and I got to take my photo with a massive Lenin head. After that we went to the Tallinn City Museum, which told stories and showed artifacts from Estonian history starting from Medieval times and ending with the fall of the USSR. One of the docents got to talking to us and she was so excited to hear that “people from the West” were in St. Petersburg studying the Russian language. She seemed to love Russian language, but still hated the Soviet Union like a good Estonian.

After dinner, you know exactly where we went – the pancake house! Dan and I got one blin each, like normal people, and Zoltan got two. He stared at them like a kid in a candy shop, it makes you happy just to see how excited he gets about bliny. He amazingly downed both without an exploding stomach, not sure how that’s even possible. Content in the belly and with our weeklong travel, we went back to the hostel for our last night.

The bus out of Tallinn left at 7:00am and arrived in St. Petersburg around 3:00pm. An entire hour was spent at the Estonian-Russian border (the cities of Narva and Ivangorod) because Russian border security is intense. It’s a little strange how uptight they are about keeping track of every foreigner since the country’s biggest problems lie within the borders. Our bus was filled with Russian nationals, so us three Americans were holding back the line at customs quite a bit. A dog came onto the bus and sniffed all of us, too. I got two pretty cool stamps in my passport with little car icons on them though, so it was all worth it.

I hardly recognized Petersburg. The sun is shining, the air is warm, the streets are clean, and the rooftops have no deathly, head-impaling icicles hanging from them! My host parents were happy to see me and greeted me with food and invitations to the Petersburg springtime. Their cat was happy to see me too, but it greeted me with a huge scratch on my thumb. I doubt it’ll be easy to go back to school tomorrow, but I’ll try. And I’ll put up more photos (some with people in them, oh wow!) on my Flickr account soon…