Riga, Latvia

Or, "How Chris Learned About Exchange Rates"

$10 worth of fun!!!

 So to be honest, Riga wasn't really an important part of the things I wanted to accomplish on this trip. It started out as the way I'd get to Stockholm. By the end of my time in Riga, I was glad I went.

I arrived in Riga somewhat late; I had just enough time to find the hostel before it got dark out. The hostel I stayed at was 9 euros a night, which was a pretty good deal. Again with the slow off season tourism, I only had one roommate. He was a Frechman by the name of *insert something French here*. I don't remember. Either way, he also spoke Basque which we talked about for quite some time. If you didn't know, Basque shows up regularly in linguistic coursework. For dinner, I found some Bacon Ramen in a grocery store. Sounds like the most amazing food on the planet, right? Wrong. It was gray water with funky noodles. Poor Form, Latvia, Poor form.

The next day, I woke up bright and early. By the way, for some reason I completely forgot that it was Christmas day and it took me by total surprise that the streets were empty for the better part of the day. There's something fantastic about walking around in empty streets. It felt as though the city were mine. I could move around the streets without paying attention to traffic lights or crowds.
I found my skyscraper, the Latvian Academy of Sciences, and after that I made my closer to the center. The map I printed out had a few sites marked on it, but I definitely didn't research enough. Unfortunately, because it was Xmas, the ONE museum I wanted to see was closed. I, however, would get a chance to visit the Occupation Museum later in my trip.

Fish, mayo, potatoes, cheese, apple, beets...YUM

I managed to visit all the marked sites within a couple hours, leaving me the rest of the day to do whatever. This early on in the trip, I was still strictly budgeting. The thing about Latvia is that the Lat is one of the worlds most highly valued currencies. It's pegged somewhere around .53 lats to the dollar. So when you walk past a McDonald's and see what looks to be a $4 Big&Tasty (sadly, my favorite McDonald's sandwich), it's not really a $4 sandwich--it's an almost $8 sandwich. Sad Day. Around lunch time I felt the need to find an open grocery store. I managed to find one on the other side of the river and there I had a glorious lunch of white chocolate, bread, and a tub of Herring in a Fur Coat, my favorite salad. And all of that cost just $3!


You should know that I also collect coins, usually 1 of each type from each place I have been. With Latvia, there was no problem finding all the coins, The problem from how much money it was. Every coin amounts to almost $9! That, and as I was boarding the boat, I noticed that I had a lot of extra change left. I figured out that one of the more fun things to do was to see if I could spend all of whatever remaining change there was. Didn't matter on what, just so that I didn't have anything I didn't need. That's how the Lion Bar happened. A lion bar is the love-child of a Kit-Kat and Paula Dean. Take a kit-kat, roll it in caramel, toss it in puffed rice, add more caramel, then chocolate and you've got it.

Tallinn, Estonia

My first destination was just a simple overnight bus ride to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. For some reason, most likely strained relations between Russia and ex-Soviet states, there is no longer a train going from St. Petersburg to Tallinn despite the short distance. The bus route takes you through some back roads, most unpaved, which are probably not fit to have a top heavy bus on them. There were multiple times during the short journey where I was jarred awake by that darned inner ear.

One of my least favorite things in the world is border control. This one was not that bad. The Russian side of things is pretty normal. They take your documents (Passport, Visa, Migration Card, Registration), give you some dirty looks, stamp a bunch of things, and hand you back your passport, visa, and sometimes your registration which is useless at this point. The border control on the Estonian is just fantastically convenient. The border guard comes on the bus, takes your documents, and returns them with stamps. You can practically sleep through it. Also there are castles at the Narva border crossing. It's quite the cool welcome.

I arrived in Tallinn probably around 6AM which meant I got old town to myself for a couple hours. Well that's not exactly true; there were a few drunks still puttering about.

Regardless, Old Town Tallinn is quaint as hell. Narrow cobblestone paths and streets, lots of interesting buildings, lost of interesting shops, definitely completely different from Russia. It was simply enough to walk around. The nice people offering me spiced nuts made Tallinn feel kinda like Disneyland. That, and everyone spoke English. It was kinda disappointing.

Tallinn has, allegedly, one of the best Christmas markets in Europe. I was impressed. There were all sorts of booths, most selling some handmade crafts and some form of mulled wine. Because I have never tried that wine before, I decided to buy some of the non-alcoholic kind. The sign said "non-alcoholic" but what it really should have said was "Lots of added cognac". And that's how I got tipsy at noon and almost got lost finding the hostel. 

Like wine, but tastes even grosser

Hostel Shenanigans
Being the off-season, I was one of 3 people in the hostel. Within 15 minutes of arrival, I began to hear something reminiscent of an Herbal Essences commercial coming from the room next door. Then, while I was making myself some tea in the kitchen, a half-Indian, quarter-British, quarter-Dutch man comes in all a flutter, complaining about his stolen luggage from the last hostel he was staying in. He says, "I had 30 pieces of clothing in that bag, plus a smart phone, and a brand-new dildo. I didn't even get to USE it yet".
Well, Good to know.

So I finally have a Backpacking across Europe Story

So before coming to Russia, I got this crazy idea in my mind that because I would be over here, it would only be convenient to do some traveling. Initial brainstorming sessions resulted in a rough plan visiting somewhere between 13-14 countries. The final result? 19 Countries in 33 days.

I managed to plan about half of it before my break began, but after that I ended up adding a couple destinations. All throughout the planning process, I got a lot of "Oh My, you won't have time to do anything", or "You'll be going too fast". Well, yes. Fast was the goal. While I was traveling I realized that many people go on vacation and either spend a lot of time in the hotel or do dumb things like lay on a beach all day. Since I was essentially going to spend a month being homeless, I decided to take the time most people waste and put it toward seeing cities.

The entire trip was solo travel out of a school backpack. For most of the destinations, my phone was non-functioning and save for a few hostels, I was almost completely off the grid.

Part of the planning process included finding out what I wanted to see or get out of each location. I printed out some maps so that I would at least have a rudimentary way to know where I was.
For the most part, I am very satisfied with my trip. Of course there are places I feel I should return to someday, but I think I spent a decent amount of time in each place to get a feel for the city.

Map Below: The various colors are pretty much meaningless. I think they originally started out as marking all the different currencies I'd be dealing with.


View Eurail Trip in a larger map

Sausages are nice!

I would like to send my sincerest apologies to my avid readers (so, Mom I guess) as I have not updated nor opened this website in over a month. And while I am sure you are all curious as to what food I have been eating and whatnot, I have been up to even more fun things.

Things I should probably tell you about:
-I now have a 'book-bagging across Europe' story
-More food
-New Students
-Harder Classes

All this and more!!

I'll probably try harder to get everything uploaded, but no promises.

Adventures in Russian food #9

While in Kazan, I got the opportunity to try something truly unusual. Pinecone jelly.

According to Galia, if you pick pinecones while they are still green and soft, you can boil them in a sugar solution and then preserve them.

They taste pretty much as you'd expect: pine-y, mildly sweet. The texture is similar to undercooked bamboo or ginger, it's pretty woody and fibrous. The interesting thing about it is that there is still resin in the cone and when you eat it, if feels as if it coats the inside of your mouth. It's somewhat astringent feeling and your mouth feels tacky for some time afterward. 

Train Tips and Stories

So I feel like 4 trips and more than 72 hours in platzkart is quite an accomplishment. Here are some tips in case you ever decide to cruise Russia on rail.

1) Use the Rzd website to reserve and purchase tickets. Yes, it's in Russian, but any idiot with google translate can figure it out. Why use it? You get exactly the same price there as you do in the ticket offices. If you use a third party website or service to purchase your tickets for you, you'll probably end up paying 30%-40% more than you would by purchasing direct. Also, the platzkart option will most likely not be offered.
2) By purchasing online, you now need to head to the train station and use the ticket printing kiosk to obtain your tickets. It's super easy to use and a billion times faster than using the ticket office.
3) Traveling alone? Don't want to be locked in a box with 3 strangers who probably smell 'interesting'? Use platzkart. It's the third class, open compartment option offered in every former-USSR country. I can't speak to it specifically, but I've read from other female travelers that this is safer than second or first class because it's open, and the openness keeps people honest.
4) Don't forget your tracksuit. Approximately 20 minutes after your train departs, the clock strikes pantsless o'clock. Almost everyone changes into more comfortable clothes for the journey like tracksuits (velour, or 'mafia red or white), pj's, or other loose fitting clothes. This brings us to...
5) Slippers. Don't forget your slippers. No matter how many times the stewardess mops the aisles, the floor is still disgusting and you don't want to be wearing your outside shoes the entire time. Literally everyone has them on the train, and assuming you're near social people (or babushki) you will be asked why you don't have them.
6) Bring a cup, tea, and coffee. Every wagon has a boiler in it and the boiling hot water is free. If you bring a cup, you can fill it as many times as you want and be sufficiently hydrated for your journey. You can also buy tea, coffee, and sometimes cocoa from the stewardess for no more than 30 rubles AND you get to drink it out of one of those sweet podstakanniki!
7) Also ramen. For food, you can bring what ever you want on the train, but because the water is free, why not bring some ramen or instant potatoes. Ramen in Russia is pretty good, and on the whole, seems to be more involved than ramen in the States. Some varieties come with meat sauce (I don't quite know what that means) or miniature meat balls (think kibble-like chunks of freeze-dried meat product).
8) Think of another excuse to refuse alcohol other than "I'm taking antibiotics" because they've caught on, and it doesn't work anymore. On the way to Volgograd after we all woke up, the men in the lower bunks decided 9:30am was an appropriate time to start downing the pepper vodka. Having found out the night before that I was a foreigner, they probably thought it would be fun to get me drunk or something. I tried refusing, saying that I was taking antibiotics and the medicine wouldn't work if mixed with booze. They countered with "booze is better medicine, drink!". After about half an hour of this, I decided it was easier to take booze from strangers than to argue. This started some pretty good conversation and was a fantastic experience.
9) Russians might offer you food, so you might want to bring something to share as well. On the trip from Volgograd to Moscow, I shared the compartment with some middle-aged women who were just the nicest people ever. They also had a strange desire to feed the foreigner. Tried refusing, didn't work, ended up eating cookies with my favorite cheese, kolbasny cheese (literally sausage cheese, and it's one of the cheaper cheese, probably the Russian equivalent of American cheese).
10) Layers. Bring layers. The trips I had varied from freezing to boiling hot.
11) Train rides can be the most fun, or the scariest experience ever. On the way back from Moscow, there were two very drunk soccer hooligans in my compartment. Granted, I had the worst compartment in the wagon-- the one next to the toilets-- but jeez, that night was bad. Shortly after departure, I realized one of the drunks had a fully-loaded gun. Needless to say, I didn't sleep that night.

Moscow Redux

This time, with a mission.

For the sole reason of 'I didn't want to spend 30 straight hours on a train', I decided a stop-over in Moscow was in order on the way back home from Volgograd. My train arrived shortly after 10am and the next leg would begin at 1:10am. I had lots of time to fill.

Probably my favorite structures in Moscow are the skyscrapers constructed as per order of Stalin. There are seven of them, often called the 'Seven Sisters', and they are quite the sight on the Moscow skyline.
In terms or architecture, they are pretty good representations of the Stalinist style, about which I do not know enough about to even try to sound smart, so Wikipedia that or something. The really interesting part is that there was a eighth one planned, but was never constructed. Just off of Red Square, there used to be an absolutely HUGE church which was demolished pretty early on in the history of the USSR for the construction of this eighth sister. After the government realized that it didn't have the funds for its construction, nor would the ground support the tallest of the sisters (including a gigantic Lenin on top), construction was ended and the already-completed foundation was turned into the largest swimming pool in Europe. The church was eventually reconstructed after the collapse of the USSR, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Names of the buildings in Moscow:
-Main building of Moscow State University

-Kotelnicheskaya Embankment

-Red Gates Administration Building

-Ministry of Foreign Affairs

-Kudrinskaya Embankment

-Hotel Ukraina

-Hotel Leningradskaya

Regardless, I love the way these buildings look so used my time in Moscow to seek them out. Despite some people I know who say Moscow is difficult to navigate, I found it incredibly easy to find my way around. That is, if you know what metro you're going to, it's practically impossible to get lost there.
Fun story: It only takes a couple hours to see all 7 skyscrapers and if your train doesn't leave for another 8 hours, one day in Moscow quickly turns into "Let's see how many McDonald's I can find" Day.
I also had time to stroll down New and Old Arbat, cruise through VDNKh, and ride the longest escalator in the world (and yes, it is as exciting as it sounds).

The Arbat's are a couple of the older, main streets in Moscow. Old Arbat is pedestrian whereas New Arbat is a pretty major road through downtown. Old Arbat has a mix of older businesses, souvenir shops, and Western stores. New Arbat is partly residential and has some mall-looking things on it. Old Arbat wins.








VDNKh, now called VVTs, was built as an exhibition center to feature the various successes of the republics of the USSR. There is a pavilion for each of the republics plus many more for other uses. There is also a monorail, an airplane, and a rocket. All in all, it's the Soviet Epcot Center.