7 August 2008
Hello to all from the North Sea (again),
Our stop in Helsinki featured our first use of one of the ship’s “shore excursions”. Since Bill was more than familiar with the rest of the stops along the way, we chose to go with a “Pro” at Helsinki where the local sights are a bit more spread out than in the other Baltic capitals and not as walk able during a day’s visit. Our guide took us to Senate Square where we could take pictures of the marvelous church and government buildings and walk a short distance to an open air street market that was experiencing a dismal business day, what with the light rain and all. An other stop along the way was the Sibelius Monument, honoring Finland’s most famous son, the composer of “Finlandia”. The monument represented a modernistic impression of a pipe organ the pipes of which seemed to float above the ground. The park like setting had a half dozen busses parked at the curb with several hundred people filling their memory chips with pictures of the beautiful setting.
We also stopped at and toured Helsinki’s famous “Church in a Rock”, a modernistic chapel carved into a rock protruding from the ground in an otherwise residential setting. We were impressed with the effort someone had taken to create an unusual and beautiful chapel that was hard to recognize as a holy place with hundreds of people snapping pictures and young boys meeting the challenge presented by the possibility of scaling the rock outside to see what the world looked like from the top. Our three hour tour ended in downtown Helsinki with an invitation to all to extend the tour by shopping the downtown shops and then walking the two miles back to the boat. We were amazed that almost all on the tour accepted the invitation to shop and walk even though it was Sunday and ninety percent of the stores were closed. We chose to return to the ship and find some relief from the light rain that had followed us all morning.
St. Petersburg will probably be the high light of our cruise. Arrangements had been made months before to meet Bill’ Russian friends for a visit while we were in St. Petersburg. The friends, Andrey and Lena Kirillov and their twenty-four year old daughter Natasha, were the product of a student exchange Bill sponsored in the late eighties and early nineties. The exchange featured fifty sixteen year old Russian students visiting Alameda County for a month and fifty sixteen year old Alameda County students visiting Russia for a month. Students and adult advisors were housed in private homes, studied Russian and English and learned as much as possible about their new friends’ culture. Bill and Dee stayed in the Kirillov’s apartment home on two occasions and Andrey stayed in their home when he came to Pleasanton with Russian students as an advisor. Bill and Dee spent four days with the Kirillov’s in 2005 and Natasha spent a month with them in California in 2006.
We had managed to obtain the necessary visas to visit privately with the kirillovs. One isn’t allowed to travel independently in Russia without a visa. Most passengers on our ship who took tours were covered by the tour operator’s visa.
The Kirillov’s had been told that our ship would arrive at 9:00 AM on Monday morning and that we would be able to meet them at “The Gate” to the port at 10:00 AM. We went through passport control and found a free employees’ bus that took us to the gate; about two miles from our ship. We were in contact with the Kirillov’s by cell phone. When we arrived at the gate, accompanied by a guide that we had met who was returning home because her tour bus broke down, we learned by phone that the Kirillov’s would arrive shortly driving a black Nisson sedan. Our new friend, the out of work tour guide, was a godsend. We knew nothing about where we were going and she knew exactly where we needed to go and what we had to do. It took two passport control check points before we walked through the main gate allowing Bill to breathe easily after sweating a bit with the process. He had learned through the internet what restrictions applied on our travel and that we didn’t meet half the demands he had read about. Our visas worked.
Another call to the missing Kirillovs gave us the information that they had an accident and would be a little late. We found a tree to protect us from the light rain and waited. About 10:30 Andrey appeared out of no where carrying a huge bouquet of flowers. The flowers were handed to Dottie so Andrey and Bill could share an embrace that demonstrated their true friendship. Dottie insisted on getting into the greeting act and laid a hug on Andrey that he will tell his friends about at his hundredth birthday. We learned that their car was involved in a minor accident. They arrived at the gate twenty minutes early. While waiting for us, they decided that our arrival should be celebrated with some flowers. They left to find the flowers, found the flowers and then had their fender bender several miles from the gate. Andrey walked back to meet us leaving Lena and Natasha to deal with the accident reporting.
Somehow Andrey managed to hire a car that picked us up and drove us to the scene of the accident. The Nisson and a small truck were sitting where they had collided blocking traffic for miles. Apparently in Russia you may not move cars involved in an accident until the police arrive. It took more than two hours for a policeman to make the scene and an other hour during which Natasha managed to talk the policeman out of the 4000 Ruble fee (about $180 US) to write up the accident report. Natasha told us how the policeman insisted that he couldn’t feed his family on his $800 a month salary and he needed her help. Natasha, who has become quite a mature business person (she is in commercial banking), held her ground and left with the accident report she needed for her insurance company.
The Kirillovs drove to St. Petersburg from their home near Moscow on Sunday; an eight and a half hour drive over poor roads. When they met us they had planned to take us to breakfast. Breakfast passed, lunch passed but we did have an early dinner.
The first place we were taken was St. Isaac’s Cathedral in the center of St. Petersburg. Getting there taught us quickly that traffic is a big problem in Russia’s cities. During Bill’s visit in 1989 and again in 1990 he recalled that the busses that were used with the students could travel at sixty miles an hour on side streets without hindrance. On our visit, our excellent driver never reached fifteen miles an hour as he weaved through the traffic like a pro.
Dottie was treated to a Russian tradition when Andrey ordered the driver to stop. He hopped out and returned a few minutes later with paper cups and a bottle of cognac. As we drove we sipped making the absence of lunch bearable.
St. Isaac’s Cathedral is a popular tourist destination because one can climb a 220 step set of stairs and reach the base of the rotunda and gain a marvelous view of the city. We were all well into the first hundred steps before Dottie learned that we weren’t half way to the top yet. Her smile turned to that determined look we’ve all seen before and we raced to the top. The view was worth the effort. The day was clear and beautiful as we jostled our way through the crowd around the rotunda and headed down. We found the interior of St. Isaac’s as spectacular as the outside as we browsed around and admired the gothic architecture and the hundreds of religious paintings.
Our driver knew all of the special tourists spots in town and he managed to wend our way through the traffic to find each one for us. Ultimately we arrived at the apartment the Kirillovs were using. It was a large apartment by Russian standards but sparsely decorated. The visit to the apartment was a good opportunity for Dottie to see how the more fortunate of Russian city dwellers live.
At four o’clock our party met a couple who were friends that the Kirillovs had met on a recent vacation in Egypt. The man was a professor of psychology and his wife was a teacher of English. We met at a restaurant in a boat on one of the many rivers that course through St. Petersburg, We quickly decided the restaurant must be one of the finest in the city. Our four hour dinner featured a number of cold dishes of vegetables, meats and cheeses in forms we had never experienced. Dottie’s newest experience of the day was the Russian love of toasts and vodka. The first toasts were short speeches by each of the diners accompanied with vodka, and more vodka, and more vodka. She got in the spirit of the evening and presented her own toast accompanied by yet another splash of vodka.
We returned to the ship knowing that we had a very special day. Tuesday the Kirillovs picked us up again to take us to breakfast before they left for their return drive home. One thing led to another and we found that it was past 10 AM when we walked away from their apartment to find a place to eat. What we found was that most restaurants had stopped serving breakfast and had yet to open for lunch. We walked at least a mile or more before we found a 24 hour Sushi/Whatever chain where we had our meal. We ate our fill but didn’t find anything on the menu that looked like eggs and bacon or hot cakes. Breakfast with chop sticks was a new experience for all of us.
Our last port of call was Tallinn, Estonia. Estonia is a unique little country that has been a recognized entity since the eleventh century but rarely as its own country. The Swedes, the Danes, the Germans and the Russians have taken turns conquering and governing Estonia until the fall of the Soviet sixteen years ago. It is now a self governed country and doing quite well by European standards.
Tallinn has been an important port city for centuries. The old part of Tallinn was developed by the Germans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The old town is still pretty much as it was originally built with winding cobblestone streets and quaint houses that occasionally display a chip in their exterior plaster to reveal walls built of stone rather than bricks. We taxied to the top of the town and walked around the town in a downhill direction allowing us to see much of the little town missed by the organized tours. We made our way to the town plaza where we stopped at a sidewalk café to watch the hundreds of tourists from the five cruise ships in the harbor as they pawed through the Estonian handicrafts in booths on the plaza. A short walk back to our ship ended our Baltic visits each of which gave us an interesting insight into this wonderful part of the world.
Our Love to all,
Gram Grandpa, Mom, Dad, Dottie and Bill
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment