So, I bought 10 hours at the internet cafe, thinking that this way when I uploaded my pictures to the login number (which takes forever) they would be there for the next dozen times I would use the computer here. However, they only save them for 4 hours. :-( So, no pictures this time. I'm not waiting in line, then waiting for the pictures to upload to my login, then waiting for the pictures to upload to Facebook, then writing cute little comments for all of them. Ha. I'm not that ambitious. Sometime soon, though, I promise...
Anyway, vacation! It was great... Let's see if I can help you out a little in understanding where I was.
Friday, October 26:
We left for Tallinn, Estonia on an overnight train. However, we were not in a sleeper car. I didn't really sleep until after the border checks (both at 4:30am because of the time change between Russia and Estonia even though they were an hour apart). At that point enough people had gotten off the train that we could lay on two seats instead of sitting in one.
Saturday, October 27: Tallinn, Estonia
We arrive in Tallinn at 8:30am to a cute, sleepy little Baltic city. We go to the hostel and everyone's still in bed except for a guy who has to leave for Riga soon, so we decide to come back later. We check to see if there are any places in Old Town that sell ferry tickets to Helsinki, but there aren't, so we grab some krooni (Estonian currency) and head back to the hostel, where the host, Jonathan, greets us happily, if not sleepily, and tells us about the city. We walk around for a while, see some pretty cool stuff, buy some ferry tickets for the next day, and eat some delicious Estonian pancakes, sourkraut soup, and fried mashed potato balls with garlic sauce for lunch and some dumpling-type-things for dinner. Pretty good. Especially the sourkraut soup. We get back to the hostel and everyone's there. It was pretty cool to hang out with all these people who were just travelling around for a while. Then the doorbell rang and I was closest to the door so I went down to open it (the hostel is on the 2nd and 3rd floors). Slippery stairs and socks do not mix. I fell and hit every step on the way down. Probably broke my tailbone, as it still hurts a lot now, and it's more than 2 weeks later. Everyone else was going out for drinks, but I decided to stay home and sleep because I'd only slept like 3 hours the night before, and now my butt hurt a lot. So, I slept.
Sunday, October 28: Helskini, Finland
We got on the boat to Helsinki at 8:30. Okay, more like cruise ship. Pretty ridiculous for a 3-hour ride. I slept most of the way, even though I was very uncomfortable in my chair. Helskinki was pretty lame. It had a couple cool things, but not really a lot. We went to the National History Museum and the National Gallery. Finnish painters aren't very good, in my opinion. The history museum was pretty cool. They had Finnish battle axes, which are by far the coolest type of battle axe. We also ate reindeer. It was amazing. Not as cool as bear (which places also had), but almost a quarter of the price. As my friend Anna's friend put so well, "Helsinki is a cool place to stay for 6 hours; unfortunately, I had 8." Well, we had 10 before we took the late ferry back to Estonia. If you are ever going to go to Finland, you'll probably want to go to somewhere in addition to Helsinki or you'll also be disappointed.
Monday, October 29: Parnu, Estonia; Riga, Latvia
We left Tallinn at 10am by bus and decided to stop off at a little resort town called Parnu (there's supposed to be a little circle above the a in Parnu). We had 4 hours there. This is more than enough for a little beach town when it's the end of October. Apparently it was the first city in the Soviet Union to have electric lights. This is probably why it was considered "resort-like". It was pretty cool, but I could have done with less than 4 hours in Parnu. There's not really much to see. It's kinda a go-to-the-beach place. So, we got to Riga at like 7ish or something and headed to the hostel. Then we went to a Latvian pancake place to eat. Pretty good, but not as good as Estonian pancakes. Then we met up at the hostel with some other pretty cool people from English-speaking countries living in foreign countries. We went out to have a drink or two and ended up going to this really lame bar and these two English stag guys followed us and kept introducing themselves to us because they were so drunk they forgot they'd already asked us our names like a half dozen times. So, we tried to lose them, and ended up just going to McDonald's where some Russians thought we only spoke English and said some pretty funny stuff about one of the guys we were with. The guys were upset, but I just thought it was funny. Then we went back to the hostel and slept.
Tuesday, October 30: Riga, Latvia
The next day we went to the Occupation Museum. I think this is the longest I've ever spent in a museum. It was ridiculously sad, too. Then we went on a really long walking tour of Riga. It was pretty, but we shouldn't have tried to do both walking tours in one day, even though we only had one day there. Riga is an amazing city, and everyone should go there--especially if you're learning Russian. 40% of Riga's population is Russian, and therefore more people speak Russian than English. Pretty cool. Also, they're ridiculously high-tech (they were in Tallinn, too). They have phone booths all over the city, and if you sit within 100 meters of one of these telephone booths, you can use WiFi. Pretty awesome for a former-Soviet-Union city. Heck, pretty cool for any city.
Wednesday, October 31: Riga, Latvia; Vilnius, Lithuania
So, we didn't leave for Vilnius until early afternoon, so I slept in. Then I walked around this cute park by a river and a monument. Then I ate some lunch from a grocery store and got on the bus around 1 or 2. It was a gorgeous day, so of course we were on a bus. We got to Vilnius just before dinnertime. We met up with this guy in our hostel that had answered the door at the hostel in Tallinn and left the day we arrived in Riga. We went to dinner with him at this Lithuanian place. We got the "potato sampler" or something like that, which has all the different potato specialties from Lithuania. There were 2 kinds of zepplins, potato pancakes, stuffed potato pancakes, and even "potato sausage". The potato sausage was mashed potatoes mixed with some sort of meat (I assume pork, but I couldn't tell) and then stuffed into sausage casings (otherwise known as pig intestines). This is probably the single grossest thing I have eaten in my entire life. It tasted and smelled like what I've always imagined food that gives you food poisoning tastes and smells like. I took 2 bites and I couldn't eat anymore. I shudder to think of it. We saw some people dressed up for Halloween and acting like drunken idiots--kinda like being home! :-) Then we got some Lithuanian beers and went back to the hostel to enjoy them. Unfortunately, the only stations they received without dubbing were the news and VH1. We watched the news. Then I slept. And I slept and I slept...
Thursday, November 1: Vilnius, Lithuania
And I slept... Until about noon or something. Then I woke up, went on the computer for a little (no one was at the hostel) and went sight-seeing for about an hour before Anna (the girl I travelled with) and I met up. We at at a different Lithuanian place this time and I was determined not to get anything potato (as I'd had MORE than enough potato the night before) but I ended up getting potato pie, because apparently potato is the only thing Lithuanians do. It was also mashed potato mixed with some sort of meat, but it was tastey this time. Then we walked around a little more and went back to the hostel because the weather was crappy. We hung out for a while, I bought a couple plane tickets for December, and then we went to this weird Italian/Indian/Asian vegetarian restaurant where I had some pretty awful Indian food. Then we hightailed it to the hostel and to the bus station to catch our overnight bus to Gdansk. There were 6 people on the bus, so we laid down and put our feet across the aisles. It wasn't so bad.
Friday, November 2: Gdansk, Poland
We got to Gdansk mid-morning and decided to go to the hostel. We only could leave our bags there because the check-in lady had a break from 10am-2pm. So, we left and walked around the city a little. We saw the sights. There are a lot of pretty buildings in Gdansk, apparently designed in the Amsterdam style. I don't know yet if Gdansk looks like Amsterdam, but if it does, just go to Amsterdam, where they don't speak only Polish.
Saturday, November 3: Kaliningrad, Russia
So our bus left at like 7am so we had to leave at 6:30am to get there, but Anna didn't change her watch to EU time, so we ended up leaving at 5:30am. It wasn't so bad because I got to eat breakfast, which I wouldn't have been able to do if we'd left at 6:30. Bus, tailbone, ow, blah. Then we got to Kaliningrad and I asked the least friendly information-booth attendant ever (In RUSSIAN, mind you! Imagine if I had asked in English!) where the hostel/hotel was that we knew was in the train station. She looked at me like I was stupid. I guess I was I supposed to know it was up the stairs at the end of a ridiculously long hallway behind an unmarked door. How could I have missed it?! So we walked around Kaliningrad and ate lunch at this ridiculous restaurant called "Oleg" where they gave me my 220-ruble change in 10-ruble bills. Ha. Kaliningrad is a BIIIIIIG city, so we realized we had walked a long way and took a marshrutka back. We kinda just hung out around the hotel (we had our OWN room with our OWN bathroom and a TV and paid $41 altogether). Then we wandered over to the local shopping center and grabbed some really expensive pizza from the only restaurant there (but at least it was really good pizza) and some groceries from the extremely Western supermarket. Ahh, sleep (after watching a movie about the Romanovs).
Sunday, November 4: Kaliningrad, Russia
We walked a lot. A LOT, a lot. We went to this church and saw the most ridiculous museum ever. It was mostly centered around Kant who lived in Kaliningrad. It must have been 5 stories tall. And there would be like these cool old paintings, and then one from 1994. I'd see some cool old stuff from way back when, and then a CD. It could have used some organization. Also, some English descriptions. Apparently only Germans who want to see their Prussian roots go to Kaliningrad, so everything was in German. Really crappy city. Too big to be walkable. Not enough to see in the amount of days it would be comfortable to walk through. I did get to see some Soviet military equipment, though. Then we left for the airport at 7ish, after managing to lock our backpacks in a left-luggage locker (apparently you pick your code on the INSIDE while the buzzer is going off. Oops). No harm though, because the guy was like, "Describe the backpacks." So we very poorly started saying colors in Russian and he was like, "What is INSIDE the backpacks?" And I was like, "A banana!" because I had bought two at a supermarket and only ended up eating one. He laughed, opened the locker and said, "And the banana?" and I open my backpack and pull out the banana. He just shook his head and walked away. Bus to the airport. Plane to Moscow (plus two busses at the airport). Bus to the metro. Metro to my home. Finally, back in my own bed...
All in all, it was a good trip. Hopefully, I'll have some more pictures up soon. There will be more descriptions of the specific places I saw along with the pictures. I just can't sit here any longer because I have to go pick up a package at the post office! :-D Yay!
