Problems? Traveling? Never Happens!

Perhaps the deadpan expressions on my and Jodi's faces communicate clearly enough the falsehood of this post's title. There are always problems when you travel. Of all the places we've gone to, even here in St. Petersburg, I'd say that we only reached 5% of them without getting lost or having some issue come up. The truth is this vacation went remarkable well, for the most part. We made it to every place on time, we had all the documents we needed to get through Customs quickly, it was great. Right up until the night of November 5th, when it all came crashing down.

We were at the ferry station more than two hours early, ready to go. This was the ferry that would take us home, from Stockholm to St. Petersburg. It was going to be a very long boat ride - over 30 hours - but we were looking forward to spending a couple days on the luxury cruise ship Anastasia. We were laughing and joking all the way up to the ticket counter.

We handed the lady our ticket receipt. (We'd printed them off a week before; we'd bought them online through a booking service.) She glanced at the paper, then responded, "No, there is no room on this ferry."

What?!

Needless to say, we were confused and upset. What followed is a VERY long story of tears and screams, arguments and prayers, and a whole lot of us thinking, "How are we going to get back in time to teach on Tuesday? How are we going to get back at all?!"

In the end, we did work something out. We decided to take the next ferry to Tallinn, Estonia (Never thought I'd be there again so soon!) and then take the very next bus home to St. Petersburg. It would cost us quite a bit of money, but hopefully we'd be getting a refund on those ferry tickets for the Anastasia, evening it out.

Still, though, it was a pretty bad night.

We crawled back to the hostel we'd been staying at, and hopped on the ferry the next evening. This ferry was called the Victoria, and it was very fancy. We were cloistered into tiny rooms in the very middle of the ship. No window seats, but if you had a hard time sleeping then you could lie in bed for hours, feeling the boat rock back and forth on the dark waves. (I did that. It was a comfort during that sleepless night.)

I have a lot of pictures of the inside of the ship - our tiny rooms, the casinos, the movie theater, the many different stores and restaurants, the shiny walls and guilded railings - but I can't be bothered to post them here. Besides, we only glanced at most of it. We were tired, and it being an overnight ferry (and we being unable to use the casinos) we decided to go crazy and get eight hours of sleep that night. It was weird.

We got to Tallinn the next morning. It was a bittersweet reunion - all the things we'd loved now seemed annoying and time-consuming. We didn't want to be there, but there we were. We headed to the bus station a.s.a.p, but when we got there we found out that the next bus to St. Petersburg didn't leave until midnight. That meant we'd have to occupy ourselves in Tallinn for over twelve hours while we waited!

None of us were up to sightseeing, so we did the only thing we could think of: we went back to the Monk's Bunk. Some of the workers recognized us. Once we explained the situation to them, they agreed to let us spend the day there, hanging out in the living room while we bided our time. It was incredibly nice and made everything seem a little better. We ate once more at the elk soup place, and then for dinner treated ourselves to "New York Pizza," which was very good and a lot of fun. We spent a long time in the nearly-empty pizza joint, laughing and debating and just talking. It was a beautiful moment, and I was grateful for this vacation if only because it allowed us all to become such better friends.

We got to the bus on time - naturally, we'd been waiting all day - and rode it overnight back to St. Petersburg. It seemed to take much longer than the ride out of St. Petersburg - especially when we got to Customs - but we were just happy to be going home. We finally pulled in to St. Petersburg at about 11:00am, and we had to be prepared to teach at 4:00pm that same day. We groaned and creaked getting off the bus, then bid each other farewell as we all went home to clean ourselves up a bit and maybe catch a nap. There's nothing like a long vacation to make you really tired.

Especially when it ended with so many mishaps.

So now - at long, long last - you are caught up on the vacation. I have been back in St. Petersburg for nearly two weeks. I would say that you haven't missed much, but that simply isn't true. Every day here is such an adventure, even if just the simple adventure of trying to teach three year-old Russians how to speak English. There isn't enough time in the world for me to tell you everything that has happened, but now that I've got the vacation out of the way, at least I can keep you up-to-date on the important things.

Like, today I did a Lord of the Rings puzzle at Institute. And it was EPIC.