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.
