Alright, I am here. Here being St. Petersburg. It’s not sunny but it does seem to be ac chiutecturally interesting.

I slept about four, maybe 5 hours last night, but I woke up around 7:30ish, started thinking about what was happening, what was going to happen, and that was about it for sleeping.

Flight from New York to Helsinki was way late, and I’ve now spent more time in Terminal 4 at JFK than I really needed/wanted to.

Arriving in St. P, there were all of four gates at the airport. You would’ve thought it’d be a bigger airport, you know? Despite much apprehension, customs with nothing to declare involved, umm, walking through a doorway.

Beyond the doorway, our academic director failed to appear. No problem, we were late, we’d just wait. We waited. An hour and a half later we started trying to call someone. We found a smart phone. It was smarter than we were, or it was smart enough to figure out it didn’t like us, or something. Eventually we did manage to place a call to the program office in the US for $4.20 a minute. And it only let you charge $10 to a credit card at a time. This made for a very quick conversation. About ten minutes later we called again. Well, they called the academic director, she had just been at the airport, but hadn’t seen us! How could she miss us, became the question….

Eventually we were united with her, and her gentleman assistant. Her name is Alla, and she is small and sprightly. Her manner of speech reminds me rather of Priscilla Meyer of Wesleyan fame. We all piled into a van, barely fitting with all of our luggage, and tooled into the downtown, to Nevsky Prospekt. We’re spending the few days of orientation in an apartment. All ten of us, one apartment. To start off right, we have to get some communal living in.

The apartment is huge, and labrynth-like. It sort of goes around in circles. I am going to try and draw a map of it, mainly for my own peace of mind. It has two kitchens, two showers and two bathrooms. (Toilet and shower are separate here.) It is also extremely furnished. Apparently it belongs to a woman whose husband recently died and she doesn’t feel like living there. The husband, and his brother too, were artists. There’s a lot art around the place, and a bunch of artbooks. The bedroom which I’m sharing with one of the other girls has some lovely pictures of, well, people dancing around a phallus. A very large phallus. Honestly.

Crazy artists.

Going back to the airport… we came into a new terminal, which is right next to the old terminal. We walked over to look at it, also because it had the payphones in it. It has a very grand central room/hall, with frescoes on the ceiling or planes flying and people dropping with parachutes. Not sure how the parachutes are supposed to reassure prospective travelers, but that’s what the soviets wanted I guess. Also, of course, a large relief on one side of happy soviet people. And a large map of the country showing Aeroflot routes. Really rather impressive.

We were supposed to have dinner at a restaurant specializing in blini, but when we got there we were rather late and they’d cancelled the reservation, so we went to a bar sort of place instead, which had quite good food, and a live band. We danced a bit and tried not to stare too much at the couple who were making out at the bar for the entire hour and a half we were there. We decided that no qualms about pda is probably a hold over from communism and communal living and the absolute lack of the concept of privacy. Still, it’s going to take a bit to get used to people, umm, planning families while I’m eating.

So, the highlights so far: the soviet terminal, the fact that I’m living in a communal apartment on Nevski Prospekt, where there are phallic paintings in the bedroom, and probably the couple at the bar for shocking all of us Americans, at least at this point.

Now it’s almost half past ten, and Alla the academic director was supposed to reappear at the apartment at ten for breakfast. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and when I show up there will be prepared food waiting…

Alright, I am not going to sleep on the streets of Helsinki in December! Talked with Meredith, who was in Finland with me, got her host-mother’s email, sent a query, a she got me my host-mother’s cell number, and I called, and it went through after I realized that I was using the city code instead of the country code and making my phone card unhappily confused. Wherever 013 is, you’re not allowed to call there on a calling card…

Anyhoo, Äiti was pleased to hear from me, my host parents are living in the same house although they had moved briefly to Tampere. My brother has a girlfriend, and she wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. Also a cell phone. I have neither… Told her I’m looking for a boy who’s bilingual, and they’re a little hard to pick up in America and I don’t feel the need for a cell phone when I’m at school and most of my friends are within three blocks of me.

Not that I would having both, of course. Switched up an itinerary page, I notice Angelfire in desperation is including ads at both top and bottom, as well as pop-ups. So it goes. Eventually I will a) figure out how to utilize my educational webspace at wes, or b) start paying for some of the webspace I use. Later, obviously.

Global Balalaika Show
Aww, the Leningrad Cowboys are doing a show in Helsinki with the Red Army Choir, and I’m sure it will be great and wonderful and funny, but I won’t be there, yet. I might have been, but the travel agents told me I couldn’t go to Finland before going to Russia, although I can stay afterwards. That’s just the way a group fare ticket works.

But I did choose to stay after. This means that, for a small ticket change fee, I will spend a week of December in Finland. Not something, I suppose, that many people would want to do, but I’m not many people. I’m just me, and I made the ticket change before making sure I would have a place to stay.

Fortunately I reestablished contact with a Finnish friend who lived in my neighborhood and went to my school. Salla is now studying to be a doctor in Kuopio, and although she’ll be having exams during that week, she said I could come and visit her anyway. Sweet. 🙂

So the plan is to arrive in Finland on December 10, which is Wednesday, and leave on December 17, also Wednesday. On the weekend I hope to go and visit Salla, it’s not too long by train between Helsinki and Kuopio. Then there’s before and after the weekend, when I hope to spend time in Helsinki, because I never have, and visit my host family.

That’s where it gets a bit problematic. Salla said she had relatives and friends in Helsinki, and I think I could probably find some sort of AFS contacts there who would be willing to have a former exchange student sleep on their floor for two days. Visiting the host family, though.

They were going to move the fall after I left, because my host brother was going to go to a vocational school and be a pilot. But then he changed his mind after a semester, and I have no idea which city my host parents may be living in now. My host brother, I believe, is now serving his mandatory time in the army.

I tried calling the number I had for my host-mother’s cell, but a man answered who definitely was not her. And the number that was the home phone doesn’t connect. So, therefore, I have spent the past several weeks tormenting myself and finally this morning have finished composing and sent an email to last email address I had for my host brother. It was hard because we weren’t so friendly with each other. I mean, we never were openly hostile, but I don’t think we were ever particularly nice to each other, after the first few months. I did think it was all his fault, but after several years, I suppose I am not blameless either, and I merely hope that we are both older and more mature…

Unfortunately, the email has quickly come back as undeliverable. What if they’ve disappeared off the face of the earth? I think now my next course of action is to try and contact AFS Finland…