Brussels: 7.31.10

Hmm...those last few posts were utterly useless!

As you have heard, we have left Helsinki behind in favor of Brussels, a decision I am very pleased with (not because I disliked Finland, mind you, but because I adore Belgium!). I didn't think I would ever manage to convince Jon to see Brussels, since the only compelling argument I could think of for going was "But it's pretty! Really pretty!" and I'm fairly certain that's not exactly what most men look for when determining which cities they would like to spend time in. But he reminded me that Belgium has:

A) Chocolate
B) Beer
C) Waffles

...and the rest, as they say, is history. In a rather epic turn of events, we spent our travel day having breakfast in Helsinki, lunch in Stockholm, and dinner in Brussels. I think that sums up my life (or my ideal life, anyway) nicely. :)

My final opinion of Helsinki is that it is a pretty city, and one that I would definitely return to, but not a location that I would live in for an extended period of time. I'm not sure it suits me for a long-term stay. It impressed me visually, as I said, but food was expensive and not terribly good. I didn't get much of a chance to interact with the people, so I wasn't able to get a feel for how friendly they are. Then again, I suppose it's always possible that I didn't interact with them because they weren't friendly and were avoiding me! I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, though! My only regret where Finland is concerned is not spending more time exploring Helsinki during the day. Work, as per usual, got in the way and I had to spend much of my time glued to my laptop. Maybe one day I'll go on a vacation that's just a vacation, and I can journal and blog until my fingers fall off! We did at least manage to go on a few nice walks through the Helsinki streets, and have a picnic of Chinese food in the park by the lake that was outside of our hotel. Fighting off the bugs was good practice for the upcoming annual family camping trip. :)

The other highlights of Helsinki were the foreign-themed bars - our first night was spent in an Australian-themed bar, as I mentioned, and we whiled away the hours of our second night in Prague- and Dublin-themed establishments - and the gay club we stumbled upon on the last night. I wish we'd discovered it earlier! It was described to us as "straight friendly," and in fact it was so straight friendly that practically everyone there was straight! Jon even managed to win money at the blackjack table they had despite claims that "Straight guys never win!" All in all, a lovely evening and the perfect end to our time in Helsinki.

Shoulder Watch: The Mysterious Shoulder Pain was significantly less aggravated than I was expecting it to be after our flights to Belgium. Perhaps things are looking up!

Pre-Trip: 7.30.10

My apologies for the delay in updating...we've been on the move, and our newest hotel doesn't have Internet. Hopefully I'll have a new post for you soon!

But in the meantime, here is a picture of me...hangin' out with Eddie Izzard. :)

Brussels: 7.29.10

Still wishing I had antigravity toothpaste.

Instead, I am now in Brussels and had, only a few hours ago, my first Belgian waffle in 8 years. It was glorious.

Helsinki: 7.28.10

Today's lesson: Brushing your teeth is infinitely more fun when you are half asleep and "Flouride Anticavity Toothpaste" reads as "Flouride Antigravity Toothpaste."

Helsinki: 7.27.10

As it turns out, the bus to Helsinki = significantly less sketchy than the Chinatown bus. I was expecting an ancient rickety contraption with a driver who made me fear for my life at every turn, but this was actually a respectable operation! The journey felt interminable, of course, but it went off without a hitch. Jon and I managed to sleep through most of it, only really waking to pass through passport control. We also managed to be awake long enough to see that our neighbor was carrying 5,000 euros! My undisputed favorite moment of the trip, however, was our stop at the duty free shop: all of the other passengers practically FLEW off the bus, and when they returned almost every single person was carrying a bag with the unmistakable clink of alcohol bottles jostling against each other. Oh Russians, how you amuse me!

The bus dropped us off in what appeared to be a very large, very cosmopolitan city square and shopping center. It was a bit jarring, coming from the significantly less modern and industrialized Saint Petersburg, but very beautiful nonetheless. It was sometime between 10:30 and 11 at night as we walked to our hotel, so we got to enjoy all of the city's gorgeous lights along the way. We checked in and stayed briefly, so that I could call home to wish Nik a happy birthday, and then ventured out in search of food.

Most everything was closed, so we grabbed cheeseburgers at a stand on the street and wandered back to the square we'd arrived in to find drinks. Jon spotted a McDonald's and dashed inside instantly for an order of chicken nuggets, but they ended up being one of the saddest excuses for a processed chicken product that has ever passed through my lips. We made for a dismal first Finnish food experience with the discovery of an establishment called Aussie Bar. I stuck to drinking water, but Jon said that his Long Island Ice Tea was the best alcoholic beverage he'd had since leaving the States, plus my water was actually free and both it and Jon's drink contained ice! The last two things are, of course, rarities in Europe.

Things are definitely off to a good start in Helsinki.

Saint Petersburg: 7.26.10

Happy birthday little bro! :) In seven hours time I will be in Helsinki, Finland and hopefully I will be able to call you from there to send you my felicitations properly.

Yes, I said Finland. Helsinki, to be precise. As you can see, we have already deviated from the list of intended destinations for this journey. The plan to make Odessa our next stop was scrapped, as tickets proved to be significantly more expensive than either of us was expecting. Potential new plans ran the gamut from Belgium to Sweden to a return to Malta, but we settled on Helsinki because plane tickets were only around $130. Or so we thought. Clicking on the link to purchase the tickets lead to a new page which featured fares that were, shall we say, drastically enhanced.

The next plan was a train, which was only a little bit more expensive than the initial price we were quoted for the plane. I figured most any train ride had to be better than my train-related experience in Venice (http://occasiopraeceps.blogspot.com/2009/11/venice-103109.html), so I was totally on board for the railway approach. but then we discovered a Saint Petersburg-Helsinki bus for only $40 and, well, that price was just too good to pass up, though it adds an extra hour to our travel time. It's a small price to pay for a small price!

[On a side note, someone is playing Muse very loudly in the bus station and it's making me immensely happy.]

Our last nights in Russia were very quiet, in keeping with what is apparently the theme of this trip. We said our goodbyes to Metro Club on Saturday night, but the event turned into a deep discussion about life and other trivial things over beer and absinthe instead of an evening of vapid partying. As on previous days, we kept our internal clocks on east coast time and stayed awake until our hotel began serving breakfast at 8am. We then napped for a brief while before checking out and trekking to a new hotel, a short ways off of Nevsky Prospekt.

Sleep...sleep...and more sleep...and suddenly it was evening, Russian time, and it was time to get up! It sounds confusing, but I actually rather enjoyed getting to know my vampire side, filling pages with story notes in cramped and frantically excited handwriting, indulging in mint chocolate chip ice cream at 5:30am, and watching the city and its denizens wake for the day.

Must go for now...Helsinki beckons!!


Shoulder watch: Ouch.

Saint Petersburg: 7.24.10

Not too much to report today...after our chat with Boris the previous night, he instructed Jon to carry the bottle in his pocket and sent us off. When we returned to our hotel room, Jon took an hour long business call with a wonderfully stereotypical New York Jewish woman. The call was interminable, but in kept us up until 8am when breakfast is served and Jon now has a very high profile interview set up. Other than that, the last day has been very low key. There was lots of work to be done, so we stayed in Friday night and were diligent. I also managed to get in some great writing on the story I devised during our last trip abroad. Well, not writing exactly, but planning. I'm really starting to believe that I am more creative while traveling than while sitting still. It's something about hotel rooms, I'm sure of it! My big problem now is that I'm unsure of how to proceed. I feel like I'll want a fairly good plan before I start writing, but I also don't want to suck the spontaneity out of the process. Where artistic endeavors are concerned, plans are always subject to change. I don't yet know when "Planning so that you have a complete, well-thought-out story with direction" crosses the line and becomes "Procrastination to avoid the actual hard work of writing." I'm also a little stuck on:

1. My writing style. My creativity is very visual (a remnant of years of writing screenplays, no doubt), and while I enjoy watching the way stories write themselves in my head, I'm having difficulty translating it into prose. I see exact looks on character's faces, hear specific tones in their voices, and often find myself confused about how to explain precisely what I see, hear, and feel without sounding cheesy or amateurish. I also find transitions troubling. I understand "Cut to" and "Fade to black" but elegant transitions in novel form escape me. What do you say? What do you leave out? I'm sure by now you're thinking "Just make it a script and stop whining about it," but the novel format is all that feels right for this particular story. A movie is too short, and a TV show is too long. A mini-series would could work - and would actually be quite fun down the line - but only on a big budget network like HBO or Showtime.
2. Execution. I can't quite shake the nagging feeling that I'm good at coming up with ideas, but not so good at turning them into readable prose. My writing always feels juvenile. Maybe I need I writing partner...I can be the idea person, and he or she can transform my ideas into something readable!
3. My shoulder, which insists on aching every time I try to write. I do not need Skinnerian negative reinforcement where writing is concerned!
   

Saint Petersburg: 7.23.10

My journal has been traveling with me for eight years...I can't believe it. It's a record of almost all of my foreign travels (Oxford onwards) and many of the things in between, and what it doesn't cover is written about in a notebook that's safely tucked away on a bookshelf in California. It's a good thing my writing is small, or I would constantly need new journals!

But you didn't come here to listen to me go on and on about my nostalgia...you want to hear about Saint Petersburg! My feelings about this trip, so far, can be summed up as follows:

THINGS I'VE MISSED
- Light switches on the outside of bathrooms
- Showerheads that can be removed and hand-held
- Hotel breakfasts (in Russia they almost always include hot dogs)
- Amusing Cyrillic spellings of English words (or foreign words we use in English)
- Russian dancing (just as bad as ever, thank God!)

THINGS I HAVE NOT MISSED
- Jet lag
- 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner
- Measured drinks

THINGS I WAS NOT EXPECTING
-Consistently good wi-fi
-Daylight for all but 4-5 hours of the day
-Russian mosquitoes

After a lazy afternoon yesterday, we made an attempt to find a new club. Most of the places we were interested in checking out were in the same are of the city, so we figured we would just head in that general direction. One long stroll down Nevsky Prospekt, the major street in Saint Petersburg, later and we spotted the first intriguing bar. It turned out to be small and mostly empty, but we stayed for a quick drink before heading off again. Who were we to turn down cheap mixed drinks and real Redbull (a luxury outside of the US)?!

The next bar we came upon looked promising, but they wanted 200 rubles for Jon and 1000 for me! That, in July of 2010, is about $30. We managed to get them down to 500 for both of us, but money is a little tight these days so we moved on.

We tried Revolution next, a club that we'd been to last year, but they also wanted an unexpectedly high cover. I'm not sure why...it's not like the locals can afford it. We wandered around for a bit, trying to formulate a new plan of attack, when suddenly we stumbled upon what can only be described as Dive Bar Row. It was like Williamsburg decided Brooklyn was becoming too upscale so it packed its bags and headed for somewhere poorer. The bars were a hipster's paradise, though with somewhat less irony and significantly less PBR. We had a drink in one before deciding that the better cultural experience would be drinking on the street with the throngs of people outside.

1 deli trip later and we were sitting on the curb, "Redbulls and vodkas up in our hands" (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBRhoB5V_fA for the origin of the quote). We got into a nice chat and fought off mosquitoes until the sun came up and the bars closed. Then the real fun began. We were on our way home when two cops approached us. I couldn't understand most of what they said, of course, but the gist of it seemed to be that, while drinking beer on the street was just fine, carrying an opened bottle of vodka down the street was not. Then they asked us to come to the station with them.

Don't get too excited...the "But I'm a tourist and I didn't know any better!" excuse worked out just fine (aided by its white lie counterpart "But we're from New York, and it's ok to do it there!"), and we ended up befriending Boris the Police Officer with a conversation about how early bars close in America and how short Tom Cruise is. We shook hands and said goodbye, and went on our merry way. I am, I must admit, a bit proud of my brush with the Russian law...it must have upped my street cred by at least several thousand points. ;)

Saint Petersburg: 7.22.10

A very successful first day in Saint Petersburg! After psyching myself up for arguing with cab drivers over the cost of the ride from the airport to our hotel, I managed to find the nicest driver in all of Russia. I was expecting to have to negotiate the price down to somewhere between 1000 and 1200 rubles - my driver offered to take me for 700 before I'd had a chance to say anything other than the address. And he complimented my Russian as I got out of the cab. Too bad tipping isn't customary here...he would have gotten a big one!

Jon was waiting for me in front of the hotel and after a few moments of glorious reunion, we headed upstairs for several hours of napping, working, and reading On The Road, which I am absolutely loving (I can't believe it took me this long to read it!).

We spent the remainder of the evening, naturally, at Metro Club, our favorite nightlife spot from last year's trip. Nothing too eventful happened...we danced, we drank, we laughed, we cried, we ate baked potatoes ("kartoshka," in Russian), &c. A typical night out.

Today began the way all days in Russia should: with blini. Salmon and cranberry. I'm going to do my best to not gain weight on this trip like I did on the last one, but I have a feeling that tasty foreign cuisine is going to prove the victor in the food vs. figure battle! It usually does.

On the plus side: the weather here is gorgeous! Who knew that Russia is a pleasant temperature at times?!

Saint Petersburg: 7.21.10

"It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow." -- Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Here I am: sitting uncomfortably in the Dusseldorf airport, waiting for the connecting flight that will take me to Saint Petersburg and on to my next great adventure. My left shoulder, which decided over a week ago to be constantly, achingly sore, is immensely displeased with my decision to put it on a long trans-Atlantic flight and make it carry a heavy bag. I'm crossing my fingers that it will heal - and quickly! - because there will be quite a few more bags and planes over the next few weeks and I can't afford to have my shoulder threatening mutiny every step of the way.

The schedule for this latest undertaking, as with The Great World Tour of '09, is not set in stone. Our tentative plan is to spend a week in Saint Petersburg, which will be nice since I didn't get to see much of it last time, followed by two weeks of traveling wherever we please. At the moment, the trip will be:

St. Petersburg, Russia
Odessa, Ukraine
Copenhagen, Denmark
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Barcelona, Spain

Only three weeks this time, but still not too shabby! ;)

My 2010 voyage began with an amazing final day in New York: a free 1.5 hour massage from a Burner friend, meeting Eddie Izzard after sitting front row, center to see him in Mamet's "Race" on Broadway, and, of course, free farewell drinks at Keybar with the nearest and dearest.

Any trip that begins so auspiciously is bound to be a good one!