Russia celebrated some sort of holiday on Thursday - the day of people and nation, or something similarly generic. What it was for, I'm not sure, and any Russians who I asked didn't seem to be either! What's more important is what it meant for us - a five day weekend!! With our visas having recently been renewed and made multi-entry, Rachel and I decided to get out of Russia and into Europe (I know St. Petersburg is technically in European Russia, but sometimes it really doesn't feel like it!!).
Unfortunately this meant an early start for us - looking out of my bedroom window at 5am I did think that maybe I could just stay at home and not risk getting raped on the metro. But I didn't spend over £200 on trains and ferries for nothing, so just after seven I was sitting on a train bound for Helsinki. Second panic - the conductor had taken our tickets....and our passports....and taken them off the train. But after some discussions with customs and border control (one Finnish, one Russian and both much more interested in the Russians trying to get out of the country than in us!) our passports were restored to us and we could feel a little smug.
Even smugger when we arrived in Helsinki two hours later to sunshine and blue skies - something distinctly lacking in St. Petersburg now that winter is setting in, we're considering some sort of points system to rate the greyness of the sky! Helsinki is small, and fairly nondescript (Vera says boring!), but unmistakably European, and because of this we loved it. Cars stop at pedestrian crossings, people smile in the street, shopkeepers greet you in English and ask if they can help you, they accept euros, I could go on.... It did take a couple of hours for Russia to relinquish its hold on me though, as I tried to converse with a market stall holder in Russian and read a bar name as 'Sorasavapa', before realising that of course it said 'Copacabana'!!
We walked around for a while, enjoying the sunshine and gawping at the prices in the shops - they say that Scandinavia has some of the highest prices in the world and they're not lying! After a quick look inside the cathedral (we needn't have bothered, Russia definitely does cathedral interiors better!) and a bite to eat in the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, it was time to board our ferry to Stockholm. I'm sorry, did I say ferry? Because this was much more like a cruise ships, complete with multiple restaurants and bars, live music, a nightclub, and half a deck dedicated to duty free. Our cabin was small, but with bigger beds than the one I got in college in first year, a TV, and an en-suite. The TV never got switched on, although we did watch Sex and the City on my portable DVD player with a bottle of Cava and a bag of Maltesers. The alcohol was a little too effective after two months of light drinking, and I got just slightly over-excited by the 'strobe-lighting' (i.e. dodgy bulb) in the bathroom.
Stockholm, where we arrived early the next morning, is lovely, the Scandinavian equivalent of Durham or York (i.e. with more water) . Apart from a short metro journey to and from the port, we spent the entire day in Gamla Stan, the Old Town, situated on an island in the middle of the city. There we went in the Royal Palace, which is still a working palace and is used, among other things, to host the Nobel Prize Winners' Banquet every year - so as I said at the time, I don't need to win one now, I've seen where the winners eat their dinner!! But my favourite room in the palace had to be the Carl XVI Gustav Jubilee Room, which was redesigned in 1998. The theme: a Swedish summer's day. The result: IKEA-central!! Not that it wasn't lovely, just slightly out of place among the grandeur of the rest of the palace! After some lunch in a cute little cafe (seriously I'd recommend it to anyone......only I can't as I don't know the name...) we looked in some cute little shops with not so cute little prices, before getting the metro back to the port.
That evening, we made the mistake of buying a bottle of very cheap wine (dare I say formal wine?) and washing it down with a couple of gin and tonics. Possibly a mistake - I remember very little of the evening, and it didn't exactly make the next day fun. However, we still managed to get out to the small fortress island of Suomenlinna, 15 minutes from Helsinki. We weren't really in the mood for sightseeing, but we made a concerted effort before giving up and going for breakfast. It was the most expensive breakfast ever, €5 for a cup of tea and a croissant, but the atmosphere was lovely and we made a friend! Alright, he wasn't exactly a friend, as we didn't actually find out his name, but we did get chatting to the American guy at the table next to us - very strange man, he told us that Chinese was an easy language to learn, and yet was refusing to learn Finnish despite living on the island.... That encounter over with, we spent a couple of hours looking for presents for our hosts (not easy, given that everything was shut - I think I've got too used to Russian opening hours!!) and buying paninis, which were meant to be for the train, but unsurprisingly didn't make it that far! In the station, I managed to buy an English magazine and newspaper (well, it was the Guardian, but it was the first English newspaper I've seen in 9 weeks!) and catch up with what's going on in the outside world. Anyone who thinks Durham is a bubble, let me tell you, it's got nothing on Russia!!
Late on Sunday night we returned to St. Petersburg to a flurry of snow. Winter is coming, but will we all make it out alive??
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