Out East

Back from Russia and probably the most memorable trip of my life. Firstly, shout outs to the amazing people I met along the way. I went without knowing anyone and came back with a veritable Hotmail address book full of top-notch friends. It may have been the intensity of everything - and i'm going to attempt a clumsy metaphor here - it was like the centre of the sun which is so hot and full-on that it changes carbon into gold (my science education finished in year 9, fyi). We laughed; we cried; we oohed and aahhed; we dissed the Russians; we searched fruitlessly for muffs and amused each other for hours with muff-related puns (i'll spare you); we drank vodka at 11.30am to ward off the cold: we spent a minimun of 40 hours next to each other on the bus (Fiona, i'm talking to YOU!). It was sad saying goodbye at Stockholm central station this morning, but not so much, because i'm planning a Swedish Road Trip of Glory in early December where hopefully i'll see em all again.

I arrived back in Lund this afternoon and I'm sitting here now in my party clothes that still smell a bit like smoke from Monday night, waiting for my peeps to come around. We're watching The Return of The O.C. and then heading out to Vasgota Nation to make sure everything is still the same. Looking forward to my first sleep in more than a week that will last for more than 2 hours.

The bare bones of my trip are something like this: I took the train up to Stockholm on October 31st, spending the day there with Nikki and Frances clad in our scummy but comfortable matching tracksuits. Later that day I met up with Fiona, a Scot who I'd never met before but had decided to share a room together, in the Stockholm Central station. Caught a bus to the ferry terminal and took the ferry to Turku, Finland, where we arrived at 6.30am. Then it was a 14 hour bus ride through Finland and Russia to St Petersburg, including passing through the James Bond 007 Goldeneye-esque border checkpoint and having our passports examined three different times. Two nights in St Petersburg, then an overnight bus ride to Moscow. One night in Mosccow, then overnight AGAIN back to St Petersburg (somehow I didn't realise we would be spending so much time on a bus...maybe I should think about these things a bit more). A night again in St Petersburg, then the 14 hr bus ride back to Turku, then ferry back to Stockholm, train back to Lund, bus back to Sparta, which brings me quite aptly to where I am now, trying to ignore all my smelly travel clothes strewn around my room.

Hmm...there's so much that I could say but I don't want to bore you The Reader with a we-did-this-then-we-did-this retelling of the trip. I'll try to keep it snappy. My first day in St Petersburg was filled with illness - after accidentally brushing my teeth with tap water I came down with a horrible nausea and fever which was probably not helped by the 2 hours wait in the snow and temperatures in the minus degrees area to get into the Hermitage, and a visit to the abnormal-foetus room in the Museum of Monstrosities. St Petersburg is a stunning city, there's something of immense cultural significance around every corner. The Hermitage was fantastic. I preferred Moscow though - we saw Raymonda the ballet at the Bolsohi, walked around the Kremlin, posed in front of St Basil's Cathedral. Only one big regret - I missed Lenin! His Mausoleum shut at 1, about the same time Fiona and I were walking around the mega department store GUM and trying to position ourselves strategically over the hideous toilets-in-the-floor. Very disappointed. Next time, Lenin, next time.

It snowed every type of snow there is. I ate stroganoff and drank vodka at 11.30am to ward off the cold. We watched traditional folk dancing and audience-participated. I fell on my arse on the ice. For once I chose function over form and bought a pair of gumboots to work as my waterproof shoes. Most importantly, I came to the realisation that Catherine the Great is my homeboy.

So the Russian people - my observations are that women and men play traditional gender roles than they do in Australia/Sweden. Everyone wears mushroom, beige and moss colours. The women wear fur and heavy, obvious makeup. There are a lot of stunners, but the men aren't as hot (with all due respect to the menfolk of Russia), there's a lot of badhaircuttage and Slavic foreheads. It seems like capitalism has found a welcoming home in post-soviet Russia. Everywhere there are high-tech light shows advertising everything, camera-flash lights flashing off every conceivable billboard to get your attention. Malls are packed with chainshops from the UK and France. All of this is set to the opulent background of all the amazing buildings of Russia. Again I was struck by how pale Australian "culture" is in comparison to everything in Europe. Strangely, I felt more Australian in the middle of Moscow than I think I ever have before.

We hit the nightlife in a hurry. Fuelled by $5 bottles of vodka, around 150 exchange students descended on the otherwise minding-their-own-business clubs of St Petersburg and Moscow and turned the establishments into hotpits of dancing and other sins and public displays of hormone-driven affection. In Moscow it was a club called Hungry Duck. Our infosheet touted it as "probably the most crazy nightclub in the world" and as we later discovered, they did it much in the same way Carlsberg makes the similar claim. What it really was was a club where more dancing was done on tables than on the floor, intemittedly interrupted by both a female and male "Strip-Off" whose quality, while exotic, was uniformely crap. Following a tip from a local, we went to a bar called Dacha (or equivalent) in St Petersberg. It was a dead ringer for the bars in Brunswick street, much more my scene, but the toilets were the most filthy i have seen in my life. I saw them in great detail, too...in sober hindsight the combination of russian vodka and beer served in pint glasses as long as my femur was not one that i would recommend to even my worst enemies.

I didn't realise how much the Russian Cyrillic alphabet would trip me out. It seems so incongurous with the spoken language - in written form it's packed full of constanant-looking characters instead of vowels, but spoken it sounds completely different. Navigating around town was a matter of trying to compare a nonsensical word on your map with another nonsensical word in front of you and if by chance they matched up somehow you were heading in the right direction. Hardly any Russians spoke English either, and with my Russian vocabulary totalling one word there were many brick-wall situations which coudln't really be solved through the use of imaginative hand gestures. On the other hand, Russians weren't deterred by the language barrier - they continued to speak it at you with increasing volume and force, as if this would somehow make things clearer. The whole experience has given me a huge appreciation of "americanised" Sweden again and more confidence in my Swedish.

So now it's back to life as usual, whatever THAT means...I've been in Sweden for almost three months and have well and truly passed the halfway mark. I turn 21 in a few weeks. Things are going good. I better go do my hair now before the people arrive and we tune into the moody stylings of Ryan from the O.C. More later. Luv youse.