I still live in Finland!

Before I continue with the last few installments of Spring Break/The Modern Odyssey, I'd just like to remind everyone that I'm still in Helsinki, and things are still happening here. Namely, spring has begun to sprung! Well, things are starting to melt at least, and it's making for some very sloppy conditions.

And it's staying light SO much longer now! When I got here two months ago it was getting dark at 3 in the afternoon. Now the sky is still light at 9:15! And the sun is still shinning at 8:30!!! No joke. And it gets 12 minutes later every day. How is this going to keep up until June 21st?

3:00pm January 22, 2010

8:00pm March 30, 2010

It's the most intense spring I've ever experienced. Even the people are starting to come out of hibernation. On sunny days they try to sit outside in cafes and pretend they're not freezing, and their black clothes are being replaced by brighter colors.

I went to the ballet the other night! It was the opening night of Sleeping Beauty (Prinsessa Ruusunen) at the Finnish National Opera. It was wonderful! I got completely lost in the experience. I felt like one of the many little girls dressed up like a princesses.

There was no way I could really capture the experience on film, but it really was wonderful. With the set, and the orchestra, and the building, and costumes, and the fact that it was in Europe, it was almost surreal.

There was some kind of awards ceremony (since it was in Finnish I have no idea what it actually was) at the end that I tried to video. The video doesn't really do the stage justice at all, but if you want to hear some Finnish being spoken, check it out.















It was also Earth Hour (when everyone in the world is supposed to Turn Out The Lights at 8:30) last Saturday. I was really excited about this because I found some events planned in Helsinki. And last year when I tried to celebrate it, I just sat alone in my apartment in Raleigh with the lights out while every other apartment I could see was lit up like the 4th of July. Well, Helsinki tried at least, but it was still pretty disappointing. They had a concert in Esplanade park, but the only "lights out" thing we saw happen was the main spotlight on the stage being turned off (which they probably put on just so they could turn it off). But it was still a fun time. This guy was beat boxing and was really good.

Easter is also coming, and it's pretty much the same in Finland as it is in America. Except instead of the Easter Bunny they have a witch that brings the Easter baskets. So for Easter everyone dresses up as witches and uses witches as decorations. It's almost like their version of Halloween.

Here is a semi-creepy picture I took out my window of kids dressed up like Easter witches with baskets: 

And here are some Easter displays in the store:

Okay. I have at least two more posts to write about the trip through the former USSR. And I don't want to rush them because we're coming up on my favorite country of all: The Czech Republic. But unfortunately, I have school related things to attend to. We just finished the first term of this semester and, for the first time in my life, I've failed a class. But I don't feel too bad about it because here is the  entire class's grade report: 

If you can't interpret it, it says that one student got a grade of 2 and two students got a grade of 1 (and this is out of a total grade of 5), and that 8 students have "not passed." And here is an example of the class that I "failed." It was called Multi-Attribute Forest Planning, and I can safely say it was the most boring class I have ever taken. And that's saying something. 

So maybe I spent a little too much time trying to get a sneaky video of the class and not enough time studying, but (call me crazy) when 8 out of 11 students fail the class, I feel like some sort of curve is in order. But it's not too big of a deal actually. At the University of Helsinki, no class you fail shows up on your transcript, and you have the chance to retake the exam ever month. So the only thing that happens now, is I have to take the exam again in April. 

Okay. As soon as the end of the month is over (which is when I have a lot of things due, aka tomorrow) I will write the conclusion to The Modern Odyssey. It's gonna be good too, folks. 

Spring break part 6: More transit though Poland

Before we left Przemyśl we spent some time in the bus station using their computer to try and figure out our next 4 days. We still needed some way to get back to Helsinki, so we went ahead and booked Ryanair flights from Prague to Finland via Frankfurt. So now we had some kind of a solid plan: we had to be in Prague on Sunday. Counting backwards from Sunday, we realized it would be totally impossible to do the Ukraine and Romania like we had been planning. That was a bummer, considering those were some of the places we were most excited to go. We figured if we could get to Kraków Poland by that night, we could take an overnight train into Hungary, and then hit up Slovakia and the Czech Republic before we had to fly out. We went to the train station to get tickets to Kraków and through a lot of pointing and gesturing, the ticket salesman told us that the train we needed left the platform in 2 minutes. He didn't sell us tickets or anything, he just told us to ran to catch the train. So there we are, running through the station in Poland, jumping on some unknown train without tickets as it's pulling away.
 I was really worried about the lack of ticket thing, since at least in Finland it's a huge deal if you get on a bus or train without them. I immediately started walking up and down the cars looking for the conductor and waving around a fistful of money so it wouldn't look like we were trying to get away with anything. When the conductor did finally come around, he was very nice (in the Polish way), and we easily paid and got tickets. We even asked him when we would be arriving (without using words of course) and he went and looked it up and came back a little while later with the time written on a piece of paper. Oh, those Poles....

Party on our private berth (or maybe it was just that no one else wanted to sit with us) on the train through Poland:

This one was really great, but unfortunately I only caught the end of it. It's a dance remix of Johnny Cash's Walk the Line. 

 

To hear the complete song, click HERE. And I highly recommend you do that. It's pretty epic. And possibly the most random thing you could ever hear on the Polish radio. Make sure you get at least 2 minutes into it before you give up. That's the point where the hook really gets ya. I'm kind of obsessed with it now. 

A nuclear plant

There were lots of Playmobil people in Poland

We got to Kraków at 11:30 at night, and luckily, there was a very helpful English speaker at the train station to help us figure out our next leg. It turned out that there was an overnight train into Hungary, but it took 12 hours, and if we did that we would be spending about 4 hours in Hungary before we would have to take another overnight train into Slovakia, spend a few hours there, and finally a third overnight train to Prague. While that would be possible, it sounded less than ideal. So we decided to scratch those two as well, stay in Kraków for the night (which was supposed to be a pretty awesome place in and of itself), and then just spend some quality time in the Czech Republic. We went ahead and got a ticket for the next morning to Olomouc, which was described in Lonely Planet as, "The Czech Republic's most under-rated destination." Sounds good to me.

Due to our less than 9 hours spent in Kraków, we unfortunately saw little more than the Sushi restaurant full of American high schoolers (described in more detail in "Eating Eastern Europe") and our hostel. It was quite a culture shock though to get off the train and have gone from this:

To this:

I don't really understand why, but somehow the train drops you off at this huge mall that you have to go through to get to the actual train station. It was quite bizarre. Although I must admit, we did stop in H&M for one hot minute.

Our snazzy hostel

Even though we didn't see much of it, Kraków seemed like a nice place (though, on that night at least, rather overrun with drunk youngsters). I'd like to make a return visit.

Spring break part 5: Przemyśl, Poland

I had picked Przemyśl as our next distination based on the fact that it has the closest train station to the Ukraine boarder which, at the time, was our next stop. It was also discribed as being a "relaxed" place, and with only 60,000 people and with it's location in the Carpathian Mountains, it sounded like a pretty nice place. But I had no idea how much we would fall in love with it.

When we got off the bus at the autobussijaam, we needed to find the town square, but didn't have any sort of map since the place was so small it only got a half a page in our travel guide. We though it should be pretty obvious, but it wasn't. So we went to somewhere that we thought was a tourist info center (which we were really shocked would be open at 8:00 at night), but it turned out it wasn't. I don't know what it was. But there was a guy sitting behind a desk and we showed him the address of the hotel we were trying to find, and asked him how we get there. He definitely didn't speak any English, but he actually walked outside with us and pointed out where we needed to go and gestured very dramatically how we needed to go up the steps, to the right, and past the castle. The Poles are VERY nice people. They don't go out of their way to talk to you, but every interaction we had with them was truly amazing. I was really feeling them. I think we had some common blood going on.

And sure enough, there was the 14th century castle.

Unfortunately however, it seemed our Hotelik Pod Basztą was no longer in operation (note the painted out H O T E L of Hotelik).

But that was okay, as we found another place that was just fine (although it wasn't directly across the street from a 14th century castle, it was just down the hill). After we checked in we went out to eat and then to a super cool bar with really nice ironwork, tiles, atmosphere, and beer. 

View of the town square out the bar widow

It was so wonderful to be in a place that 1) didn't speak English (not at all. Not even the receptionist at our hotel), 2) was not used to having tourists, and 3) was just busy doing its genuine southern Poland thing. It sounds cheesy, but it really did feel like we had discovered a "hidden gem." The only bad thing about this ideal little town (besides the fact that we couldn't say the name of it, which sounded something like shea-mesh) was that the air was absolutely filled with coal smoke. All the houses in southern Poland burn coal, and something about the valley location of this town made it just terrible. You could see it hanging in the air and it burned my eyes. It was even worse than I remember the air in China being. But other then the fact that you would get black lung after a few years of living there, it was perfect. 

The town square. In addition to someone to clean up their air, they could also use a good arborist. 

What up, 14th century castle? 

The statues were all eroded from the acid rain

Communist 

(I'd like to take a moment to credit Pinky for a lot of these photos. He took this one down a little alley while I was using the ATM)

Przemyśl is famous across Poland for its manufacturing of bells. So there is a museum of pipes and bells in the town's bell tower. Pinky has always wanted to be a bellmaker (ever since reading Redwall), so he was very excited about this. 

Pinky admiring the bells

And the strange pipes. Elvis, Reagan, and the Beetles among others. 

 And I don't know who this is, but it freaks me out. 

Inside the clock

Going up to the top of the bell tower.

And the view from the top

Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim cher-ee

Spring break part 4: Lithuania and Poland; 32 hours by bus

Due to the fact that we only had 7 days to complete this Modern Odyssey, we had to spend a lot of time in transit, and didn't have time to really spend a day in Lithuania. But it looked really nice out the window of the bus! And the bus station we spent a few hours in was definitely not the worst bus station I have ever been in.

This is what most of Lithuania looked like to me:

And this was pretty exciting: Not only did I see a real, in service, telephone booth, but there was actually someone using it!

We took an overnight bus from Vilnius Lithuania to Warsaw Poland and, partially due to changing time zones, we arrived at the bus station in Warsaw at 5:00 am. And I think I can safely say, the Warsaw bus station was the worst bus station I have ever been in. It was dirty, cold, and at 5 in the morning nothing was open. Not even the two "sex shops" that were in the basement. 

The Warsaw autobussijaam (which is actually an Estonian word, but is now my favorite way of saying "bus station.")

We had heard that trains are the preferred way of transport in Poland (faster, cleaner, etc) and there was a train leaving for the south of Poland at 6:15 (we had no desire to stay in Warsaw any longer than we had to).When we went to buy our tickets, the lady didn't speak any English so she wrote the price down for us which was 700 złoty, which seemed like a whole lot to us. So we went to check out the bus prices, and a bus ticket was only 50 złoty. We went with that even though it didn't leave until 10:00 and would take an extra 4 hours. It wasn't until later in the trip that we realized (or remembered) that Europeans make their 1's more like this: Ʌ and their 7's with a strike through the middle: 7. So the tickets had actually only been 100 złoty (about $35) and we had just mistaken the 1 for a 7. Ah, well. The bus ride was actually quite enjoyable and we got to see lots of things we won't have on a train. These are some of the things we saw:

Warsaw. Yuck.

A typical countryside dwelling 

A typical city dwelling

It was all very communist looking.  There were also a ton of apple orchards.

At one point our bus driver pulled up on the side of the road, got out of the bus, and bought 2 bags of apples from a roadside stand. It was awesome. 

Hydropillar!

One thing we noticed about Poland was how quickly the landscape would change. You'd go from broadleaf forest to apple orchard to city to evergreen forest to wetland, all in the blink of an eye. It made for exciting bus travel. The bus driver and everyone on the bus were also very nice and helpful. It was amazing how that 12 hour bus ride totally made us fall in love with Poland. And as the sun was setting, we saw a huge colony of bats that completely filled the sky.