Balloonigaas, Kroons, and the Fluu

This post is brought to you by the Estonian language, which I can’t pronounce, but think is rather amusing, since they have a predilection for doubling vowels. I mean, vooweells. And paarticullaar connsonnaannts.

This past weekend, my fellow American students and I piled into the ‘ole double-decker tour bus and went to Tallinn, Estonia. I had been looking forward to that trip since I heard about it last semester, and it was indeed a cool place to visit. Naturally, since I was coming from Russia, there had to be problems on the way there, while I was there, and on the way back. And, since it’s Russia we’re talking about, they were pretty amusing.

St. Petersburg and Tallinn are not that far from each other. It only took three or so hours to drive from the center of Piter to the Estonian border. However, it took another hour and generous change to get through the border. Not to get into Estonia, though. To get out of Russia. You see, Russia has a list of locations of every foreigner who is currently within the country (with info like this: John Smith, American, currently residing in St. Petersburg, Vasiliostrovsky Region, Maly Prospekt, House 22, etc…). When you leave Russia, they have to cross your name off that list, which entails a good amount of paperwork, fees and general bureaucratic schmaltz. Thus, when we arrived at the Russian-Estonian border, we had to prepare our passports, migration cards and multi-entry visas, and take all our luggage off the bus so that we could go through passport control. While we were getting our papers stamped (and our paperclips savagely ripped out of our passports because the border guy was mad he had to deal with 71 loud American college students), border guards were searching our bus. Then we made it out of Russia and, for fifteen minutes or so, were sitting in no-man’s-land between Russia and Estonia while the latter’s border officials stamped our passports. While Russia had required us to de-board with all our bourgeois crap in tow, Estonia sent one border official onto the bus who collected our passports, stamped them, and then gave them back to us shortly thereafter. The difference in procedure (and time) really epitomizes the difference between Russia and the rest of Europe.

Estonia, for those that don’t know, is part of the EU, so once we crossed the border we felt as if we were back in civilization. Mostly because the roads were paved nicely. (Russia has notoriously bad roads.) As we drove another couple of hours to the capitol city of Tallinn, it began to snow. The drive was pleasant, especially since my seat buddies and I were adding our own dubbing to a silly Russian movie playing on the bus.

The hotel we stayed in was supposedly a 4 star place, but compared with the 4 star joints in Russia we’d experienced, this one was a 5 star. People welcomed us to Estonia. People gave us free stuff. The rooms were nice and the bathroom floors were heated! The best part of the hotel, in my opinion, was the fact that I could drink the tap water. I felt like I was truly back in the West.

We had a walking tour of old Tallinn, which is a quaint little European/medieval city home to 400K smiling people. My tour guide was very funny (when splitting us into groups, he asked that all the pretty girls come with him…) and took us all over the old part of the city. After the tour, exploring buddy and I went around the town a bit more on our own and ran into some friends at a neat little coffee shop. We decided to have some hot chocolate, which turned out to be the best decision of a lifetime. It was a huge glass filled with a third of a cup of melted chocolate, a generous spoonful of cocoa, steaming hot milk, more cocoa powder and an Estonian chocolate on the side. Tres delicious.

Unfortunately for me, I came down with the 24-hour flu that evening, so the next day I spent mostly in my hotel room, watching strange movies and shows in Russian, Estonian, English and German. I did go out on a bus tour of the newer part of Tallinn and got to see the Baltic Sea, but I missed out on most of the souvenir-buying and general merriment opportunities. Luckily, I recovered enough by Sunday to enjoy the tour of the Narva fortress, on the border. (There are two fortresses facing each other on each side of the canal: one Estonian and one Russian. I can almost picture there having been a Monty-Python-esque exchanging of insults on more than one occasion.) We actually had lunch/dinner in the fortress, which was seriously cool, since I was seated at the head of the table and was telling everyone that it was only by my graciousness that I was allowing them to dine in my castle.

I bought a souvenir pillow at the fortress for my host sister (since I was missing her birthday and her concert by being abroad) and exchanged the rest of my Estonian stipend of kroons for rubles. I would have liked to have kept some kroons as momentos, but I barely had enough to exchange in the first place. (Estonia is moving into the Eurozone in 2011, so kroons are saying their farewell to the world.) Luckily for me, I happened to have picked up a 10 cent kroon coin (in Russia, of all places), so I will have a memento of my time in Tallinn and of the rapidly-dying currency. Too bad I couldn’t save the paper money, though. It was very colorful, like rubles.

The final excitement of the trip was the hullaballoo that entailed getting back into Russia. We had to fill out more migration cards and sit at the border (this time, the Estonian border, backed up because of the Russians) for over 3 hours. Then we hauled it home, hoping to make it in time before the metro closed at midnight…once we knew that wasn’t going to happen, we were shooting to get back before the bridges to Vasilievsky Island and Petrogradskaya were raised and we were stranded on the mainland until the metro opened again at 6 am. Our program directors called cabs ahead of time and dropped people off at lightning speed so that we barely made the bridge. Indeed, as we stopped to let people get off at Petrogradskaya, the bridge began to rise behind us. Had we spent another minute or two on the mainland, we would have been stranded. It was close, but by 3 am or so, all of us were finally home.

(In case I haven’t talked about this, St. Petersburg is an archipelago, and has a few islands connected to the mainland by the metro and bridges. The metro, as I said, closes at midnight. The bridges go up at 1:35 to let big commercial boats go through, and only certain ones go down again for 15 minutes at 2:45. Basically, if you live on one of the islands, like I do, you have to be Cinderella and make sure you’re home by midnight, or suffer the consequences and frustration of the bridge schedule.)

Though super-tired, I was very happy to be back in my lovably dysfunctional Russia. Tallinn was nice, though my experience wasn’t the greatest because of my flu, but Piter was calling me home.

And the best thing was…school was canceled for the next day. Probably because the big wigs knew that us getting back so late just meant that no one would have shown up, anyway. Forethought for the win.

Until next time,

Katya

P.s. So why balloonigaas? Because of this picture that I took at an Estonian gas station: