Helsinki/Munich/Los Angeles
June 4, 2011 

Distance Traveled Today: 6, 952 miles

Total Distance Traveled for the Trip:  19, 608

I’m a bit over an our into my twelve hour final flight home.

It’s a very long day in every sense of the word.  First of all, in terms of hours, it’s literally a long day:  thirty-four hours, to be exact.  Even weirder, at least twenty-five of those hours will be in sunlight.

Travel time from door to door:  about twenty-six hours. 

Why so long?  Well, because I’m a stupid airline ticket buyer, that’s why.  Back in March, when I was building this enormous itinerary on Expedia, I was so addled with excitement at the idea of getting to go to Russia that I just wanted the tickets reserved and bought.  So I didn’t notice one pertinent fact about my flight home to Los Angeles from Helsinki:  Not only did it start very early (the flight left at 6:55 a.m.), but it included a seven hour layover in Munich.  When I noticed this it was too late to change it, thanks a lot, Expedia.

Anyway, it was surprisingly easy to pleasantly spend all day in the Munich airport.  I had a massage, snacked, played (or attempted to play) The Temple of Elemental Evil on the laptop, and just generally explored the airport. 

Now that the trip is ending I feel it’s appropriate to revisit the goals I layed down on the first Day 1 o so long ago:

Goals For My Eleven Week Globetrotting Work Trip

1.  Endeavor to not merely look, but to See.
2. Write as much as possible.
3. Take as many good photographs as possible.
4. Try to find Mexican food in every city I’m in.
5. Try to go to the movies in every city I’m in.
6. Try to return from the trip thinner than when I left.

How did I do?  I’ll take them out of order.

Write as much as possible.  I’d have to say this was the goal I was most successful at, and feel the best about.  Writing this travel diary has been a big project, and has taken up a non-trivial amount of time during the trip.  But it’s been worth it.  I’m a very lazy writer and I was interested to see if I could muster up the discipline to faithfully write about the trip on a daily basis.  And I have!  At over one hundred pages, it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written, for better or worse.

Try to find Mexican food in every city I’m in.  Did pretty well on this one:

Cities In Which I Found and Enjoyed Mexican Food on the Trip

• Toledo, Ohio
• Cleveland, Ohio
• New York, New York
• Brussels, Belgium
• Paris, France
• Vilnius, Lithuania
• Berlin, Germany
• Munich, Germany
• Moscow, Russian Federation
• St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
• Tallinn, Estonia
• Helsinki, Finland

I hasten to add that I didn’t always find good Mexican food, but good was not a requirement.

Try to go to the movies in every city I’m in.  Not bad, not great.  It’s always a challenge in a foreign country finding a) a movie presented in English that b) I am interested in seeing and c) haven’t already seen.  But I did my best.

Movies I Saw on the Trip

• The Adjustment Bureau (Cleveland)
• Rubber (Cleveland)
• Insidious (Cleveland)
• Connected (Cleveland)
• Limitless (Cleveland)
• The Lincoln Lawyer (Cleveland)
• Source Code (New York)
• Of Gods and Men (New York)
• Route Irish (Brussels)
• Water for Elephants (Vilnius)
• Thor (Berlin)
• Life in a Day (Moscow)
• The Hangover II (Tallinn)

Take as Many Good Photographs as Possible.  I’m so glad I decided to go to the trouble of taking my new camera on the trip.  I enjoyed it very much, and I’m thrilled with the variety of subjects I had the opportunity to photograph, happy with many of the images I got, and very happy with a few of them.  I’ll pull my favorites and post them in a group on Facebook shortly.

Return from the trip thinner than when I left.  Alas, on this one, it’s Europe:1, Ivey:0.  The first order of business upon my return is to get to work shedding the Europounds.

Endeavor to not merely look, but to see.  I’m not convinced I was successful at this one much. I have a strong tendency to see what I expect to see.  Having the camera helped, though, if only in providing negative lessons.  There were several potentially wonderful pictures that I failed to get becauseI wasn’t quick enough and/or I hesitated to talk to strangers.  More, perhaps, on this later.

Helsinki
June 3, 2011 

Had a very pleasant Gulf of Finland crossing yesterday on the Tallink ferry Superstar.  I spent as much time as I could stand on the open deck, but brr!  Damn, if it’s this cold in the middle of a sunny day in June, what must it be like in January?

I got very little sleep last night at the lovely St. Olav Hotel.  It was very hot and the street was very loud.

Perhaps because of that, or perhaps just because of my general travel weariness, but when I landed in my lovely hotel room in Helsinki, I just hit the tourist wall.  I took a nap, and headed outside armed with my map and my walking tour.  And I just couldn’t make any headway. 

And that’s okay.  I have to say I’ve had really, really good Tourist Endurance during this twelve week trip.  It’s okay if on one day I simply don’t feel like exploring a foreign city.  Tomorrow I’m having lunch with an old acting friend, and perhaps I’ll feel fresher then.

It’s certainly not Helsinki’s fault.  It’s beautiful.  And the men . .  oh my.  Everywhere I look I see strapping, sturdy, handsome young men, some blond, some not-quite-as-blond.  It’s as if the city has been overrun by a convention of Midwest college football players.  This is not a complaint.  I’d love to be able to spend some time here and do some serious photography.

Places I’ve Hit the Tourist Wall

• Helsinki
• Paris
• Rome

Tallinn / Helsinki
June 2, 2011 

Distance Traveled Today: 50 miles

Distance Traveled So Far: 12, 656

It’s so considerate when relatives bring fabulous people into the family.  I’ll always be indebted to my cousin John for giving us Milana.  She and I just hit it off the first time we met, and we’ve been great pals ever since.

We had a wonderful day here in Tallinn.

First we climbed back up to the Upper Old Town to see a couple of beautiful churches and a couple of spectacular views.  The Catholic church is interesting because it’s almost exclusively decorated with dozens of huge, ornate and beautiful coats of arms from , we assumed, rich noble families.  We then winded our way through parks down to McDonalds where we fortified ourselves with fountain caffeinated sodas.

Near the edge of the Old Town was my favorite church, a soaring but spare and simple structure from the late 19^th century.

After that we spent the afternoon on the top deck of tour buses traipsing all around Greater Tallinn, learning all about the city throughout its long (and rather titanic) history.  Sitting on a tour bus listening to a canned audio tour probably sounds like hell on earth to some, but it’s the type of square, traditional touristy activity that I actually love.[1]

After that we went to a mall where I got in trouble for taking photos (why?) and then we had some Estonian Mexican food (Milana is a very good sport about indulging my Mexican food fetish). 

Then it was movie time.  Unfortunately, we saw The Hangover 2, a cynical and unfunny money-grab.  I should have known better.  But the first one was legitimately funny. This one was a bore.  Ken Jeong did what he could to add some humor, and I must say that Ang Lee’s son seems to have some real screen presence.  But the movie is awful.  It also confirms my lack of interest in ever visiting Bankok.

Milana and I are on a streak of seeing indifferent or bad movies together.  In May we saw Water For Elephants in Vilnius (yawn) and last September we saw Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps in New York (yawn yawn).

I walked Milana back to her hotel and we had to say our goodbyes, as we both had to pack and be up early for our departures the next morning.

Reasons I Think Bradley Cooper is a Good Actor

• ….uh, who CARES?  Have you SEEN HIM?

Tallinn
June 1, 2011

Yesterday had three Pieces Parts[1] and two of them were dandy.

For the first part of the day I took myself on a walking tour of Tallinn that I got off the interwebs.

After a few minutes at the ferry disaster memorial and then walked through the gate at Fat Matilda Tower into the Lower Town portion of the Old Town.  Old Tallinn is really two towns : The lower town inhabited by the prosperous Hanseatic traders and the upper town where the Estonian locals who worked for the traders lived.  The Old Town is wonderfully well preserved.

Part 2 of my first day in Tallinn began when Milana met me at my hotel in the afternoon.  Milana, you may remember, is my cousin John’s wife.  They live in Vilnius, Lithuania, but lived here in Tallinn for about a year a few years ago.  Milana decided, much to my delight, to take a tiny vacation and spend a couple of days with me here.  It’s the first time she’s been away from her new baby Vivienne, so it’s a pretty big deal!  John and I consider each other a third brother and so Milana, who I’ve known for over a decade, feels like a sister-in-law.  She and I discussed this yesterday and she agreed that “My Cousin’s Wife” didn’t really adequately explain our very affectionate relationship.  I told her I was just going to start referring to her as my sister-in-law.

We had a wonderful afternoon traipsing around town.  We climbed the very tall tower of the Baptist church as the harbor side of Old Town to get a breathtaking series of views.  This Church has a dark history, as the Soviets used it during their occupation of Estonia to block television signals coming in from Finland.   Now the Baptists use it to talk an invisible character from a Bronze Age book of myths.  I leave you to judge which is the more reprehensible.

Okay, now to Part 3.  I’m going to try to dispense with this unpleasant conclusion to the day as economically as possible.  We were to have dinner with a mutual friend.  I do not know what is going on with this mutual friend, nor do I really care, but he was supposed to pick us up and take us to this cool seafood restaurant out in the country.  He finally showed up, two hours late, drunk as a skunk, with his appalled ten year old daughter in tow.  We had actually given up on him and gone to a local Italian restaurant, but he regrettably followed us there.  The dinner that followed was . . . unpleasant.

Although everyone knows I am a teetotaler, I am not opposed to the consumption of alcohol by those who enjoy it. This being said, I have no interest in spending time with drunks.  Drunks are boring and pushy.  They suck all of the oxygen out of the room.  This dude was rude and aggressive and it was all extremely uncomfortable and I thought it would never end.  We finally escaped at almost midnight (that is to say, dusk).  Bleh.

Anyway, we’re done with him.  I must wrap this up because I’m expecting Milana any minute!

A Partial List of the Cities My Cousin John and His Wife Milana Have Lived During John’s Crazy Career[2]

• Prague
• Budapest
• Warsaw
• Frankfurt
• Tallinn
• Vilnius

[2] I am very likely leaving somewhere out.

St. Petersburg, Russian Federation / Tallinn, Estonia
May 30, 2011 

Miles Traveled Today:  196

Total Miles so Far:  12, 606

This is the most beautiful bus have ever been on.  This is the double chocolate fudge with whipped cream and a blow job of busses.  What a great suggestion from John and Milana.  I was looking into taking a ferry from St .Petersburg to Tallinn, and asked their advice as Baltic residents themselves. 

“Forget the ferry, ” they said.  There’s a super nice bus.  Take the bus. 

Well, they weren’t kidding.  The Lux Express Special is gorgeous.  The seats are so nice and wide that there are only three of them across, not four.  There’s electrical outlets (yay!), headphones with audio and video entertainment, dinner, and super comfortable roomy seats.  Did I mention the seats. 

I wish I could take this bus from Helsinki to Los Angeles.

There’s even , supposedly, free wifi, but it’s not workingat the moment.  The nice young ladies seating back near the toilet assured me it would work as soon as we crossed the frontier from Russia to Estonia.

Speaking of Milana, great news:  She’s joining me in Tallinn!  Huzzah!  She’s parking the the baby at home in Vilnius, which is just  as well, because at this point little Viv does not much care for her Uncle Ray. 

Getting to the bus was a somewhat less deluxe experience.  Once again I was stymied by my lack of Russian . The train station where I was suppoed to catch the bus was huge, of course, and no one in it spoke a word of English (and why should they?).  It was a challenge finding where I was supposed to findthe damned luxury bus.  It’s ironic, considering how nice the bus is, that the setup for busses at the Leninskaya station is as awful as it is.  There’s just a big horseshoe driveway in front of the station where a thousand different kinds of busses just slouch throudh, willy-nilly.  There are no signs giving you any hint whatsever where to wait for your particular bus.  I finally enlisted the help of a sturdy, handsome employee of another bus line who grabbed half of my bags and walked me to the exact spot where, he promised me (I think, who knows) that my Lux Express would show up at 5:30.  And priase be to Stalin, he was right.

Speaking of language barriers, I did manage to solve one tiny communication cunundrum in the station  I had parked my bags and was taking a little walk, looking for snacks for the six hour ride, when a tiny little security hobbit came up to me.  He seemed very concerned about my bags.  He walked me  back to them and began gesturing towards the large broken zippered compartment of my large blue piece-of-shit bag.  After a few minutes I realized he was trying to tell me my bags had been vandalized.  How to explain to him that this compartment has been broken for years?  That, rather than replace the bag, I leave it light that because it has three collateral benefits:  1) it discourages would-be baggage thieves (why pick THIS crappy  bag to steal? 2) it helps me identify it when it gets regurgitated out of the baggage dispenser at the airport and 3) well, it saves me the money of replacing it.

To say I didn’t have adequate Russian to explain this to the security gnome would be like saying Sarah Palin didn’t have adequate skills to teach a course on geopolitics at the Harvard School of Foreign Affairs. 

Of course, this little Russian halfling’s English was no better than my Russian.  What language would we have in common?  I thought . Then I remembered the perfect word from my fifty-word German vocabulary.

“Kaput! “ I exclaimed, pointing at the broken compartment.  “it’s kaput!!”

“Oh!  Kaput!” he said, nodding and smiling.  Another potentially tense international confrontation defused.

I enjoyed my bus ride very much.  Having my laptop and an internet connection made the seven hours zip by. 

Worst Bus Ride Ever

• A thirty-six hour Greyhound ride from Kansas City to New York.  What made it special was the fact that, starting an hour into the ride, I became violently ill from food poisoning.  On a bus.  With one tiny, usually occupied, bathroom.  Oh, the humanity.

Moscow/St. Petersburg
May 28, 2011 

Distance Traveled Today: 393

Distance traveled so far: 12, 410

Well this morning has been wall-to-wall fail.  My train to St. Petersburg isn’t until 1:30, so I got up early and zoomed down to Red Square with a double agenda:  See Lenin and go inside St. Basil’s.  Lenin’s Tomb is only open very limited hours, but I figured I’d have time today.  Alas, whatever the huge celebration they’ve been planning since before I got here and have blocked off most of Red Square for is actually happening TODAY.  So.  The Square was totally locked down, Lenin’s Tomb opens an hour later than normal, and St. Basil’s is completely closed.  Double damn.

This is a pity, because here’s the thing about when you go see Lenin:  you see Lenin  By that I mean, they preserved his body, and it’s under glass like a pheasant.  That would have been cool to see.  And it’s a shame about St. Basil’s.  I could console myself by saying I’ve already been in a bunch of Russian churches, but I know from what I have read and from what people have told me that, just like its exterior, the interior of St. Basil’s is like no other church.

Even more tragic, I showed up at the Upside Down Bakery right when they opened, hoping to score a couple of the bacon parmesan muffins for the train ride, but alas, they only had the salmon ones today.  Yuck.

I certainly hope my fail trajectory doesn’t extend to the train station.  I can get a little anxious in a big train station in an English speaking country, just because they can be so big and busy.  Where is my train?  Am I waiting on the right platform?  Is my ticket alright?

Double that in a country where I don’t know the language.  Triple is in a country where I don’t know the alphabet.  Happily I have an English and Russian version of my ticket, so hopefully I’ll be able to navigate myself to the proper track on time.    

///

So:  Who’s the most responsible for winning World War II?  Everyone knows it was the Americans, right? Not so fast.  The Russians think different, and they’re pretty sick of hearing how America beat Hitler all by themselves.  Consider a couple of sobering statistics:  Americans lost 418, 000 people in the war, a mere 0.32% of its population.  The Soviet Union lost 23, 000, 000, which was 13% of their total population.  The Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad made any action on the Western Front look like a cocktail party. 

Of course, any reasonably educated gay person my age or older could tell you the real  truth, which was  that it was a gay man – Alan Turing – who was the single person most responsible for beating the Nazis.  He did it by breaking the Enigma Code.  Take that, America and Russia.

A Few Memorable Travel Fail Moments

• Getting pulled off a ride in Brigton, England, because I was too fat to be safely secured in my seat. 
• Missing an excursion out of Rome (but not getting a refund for my ticket) when I couldn’t figure out where to wait for the bus (sound familiar?)
• Missing a train connection in Italy that would have cost me a whole day, prompting my one-and-only experiment with hitchhiking