{"id":2036,"date":"2011-06-07T08:25:06","date_gmt":"2011-06-07T15:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayivey.com\/wordpress\/?p=2036"},"modified":"2011-06-07T08:25:06","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T15:25:06","slug":"spring-forward-day-79","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rayivey.com\/wordpress\/spring-forward-day-79\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>\"instagram\"<\/a>

St. Petersburg, Russian Federation \/ Tallinn, Estonia
\nMay 30, 2011\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Miles Traveled Today:\u00a0 196<\/h3>\n

Total Miles so Far:\u00a0 12, 606<\/h3>\n
\"Tchaikovsky!!\"<\/a>
Tchaikovsky!!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the most beautiful bus have ever been on.\u00a0 This is the double chocolate fudge with whipped cream and a blow job of busses.\u00a0 What a great suggestion from John and Milana.\u00a0 I was looking into taking a ferry from St .Petersburg to Tallinn, and asked their advice as Baltic residents themselves.\"gold<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Church of the Spilled Blood. Believe it or not, it's not referring to the blood of Jesus, but the blood of Tsar Alexander, who was assassinated for freeing the serfs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cForget the ferry, \u201d they said.\u00a0 There\u2019s a super nice bus.\u00a0 Take the bus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, they weren\u2019t kidding.\u00a0 The Lux Express Special is gorgeous.\u00a0 The seats are so nice and wide that there are only three of them across, not four.\u00a0 There\u2019s electrical outlets (yay!), headphones with audio and video entertainment, dinner, and super comfortable roomy seats.\u00a0 Did I mention the seats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"tall<\/a>I wish I could take this bus from Helsinki to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s even , supposedly, free wifi, but it\u2019s not workingat the moment.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Milana, great news:\u00a0 She\u2019s joining me in Tallinn!\u00a0 Huzzah!\u00a0 She\u2019s parking the the baby at home in Vilnius, which is just\u00a0 as well, because at this point little Viv does not much care for her Uncle Ray.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Prom<\/a>
Prom Night!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
The Hermitage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Getting to the bus was a somewhat less deluxe experience.\u00a0 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?).\u00a0 It was a challenge finding where I was supposed to find<\/em>the damned luxury bus.\u00a0 It\u2019s ironic, considering how nice the bus is, that the setup for busses at the Leninskaya station is as awful as it is.\u00a0 There\u2019s just a big horseshoe driveway in front of the station where a thousand different kinds of busses just slouch throudh, willy-nilly.\u00a0 There are no signs giving you any hint whatsever where to wait for your particular bus.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And priase be to Stalin, he was right.\"pretty<\/a><\/p>\n

Speaking of language barriers, I did manage to solve one tiny communication cunundrum in the station\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He seemed very concerned about my bags.\u00a0 He walked me\u00a0 back to them and began gesturing towards the large broken zippered compartment of my large blue piece-of-shit bag.\u00a0 After a few minutes I realized he was trying to tell me my bags had been vandalized.\u00a0 How to explain to him that this compartment has been broken for years?\u00a0 That, rather than replace the bag, I leave it light that because it has three collateral benefits:\u00a0 1) it discourages would-be baggage thieves (why pick THIS crappy\u00a0 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.\"sunset\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"semen<\/a>To say I didn\u2019t have adequate Russian to explain this to the security gnome would be like saying Sarah Palin didn\u2019t have adequate skills to teach a course on geopolitics at the Harvard School of Foreign Affairs.\u00a0\"red<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, this little Russian halfling\u2019s English was no better than my Russian.\u00a0 What language would we have in common?\u00a0 I thought . Then I remembered the perfect word from my fifty-word German vocabulary.<\/p>\n

\"Dinner!\"<\/a>
Dinner!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cKaput! \u201c <\/em>I exclaimed, pointing at the broken compartment.\u00a0 \u201cit\u2019s kaput!!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

\"more<\/a>\u201cOh!\u00a0 Kaput!\u201d he said, nodding and smiling.\u00a0 Another potentially tense international confrontation defused.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed my bus ride very much.\u00a0 Having my laptop and an internet connection made the seven hours zip by.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Worst Bus Ride Ever<\/h4>\n