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Hey everyone.
Not a whole lot is new here. This past weekend we went to the palace where Rasputin was murdered. Basically Rasputin was a poor monk from Siberia who supposedly had magical powers. The Tsar, Nicholas II, had a son which was a hemophiliac and Rasputin was able to cure him. Obviously, this made Rasputin very close to the royal family…so close that he could influence decisions that were made. Of course, there were many who didn't like this and they created a plot to kill him. There's much more to the story so you can look it up if you're interested.
Wednesday I'm going to my first banya. It's a Russian bathhouse. Basically it's a huge sauna where you can relax…but they're famous. I don't know a whole lot about them.
This weekend I will go to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. I don't even remember what we're going too see, but it should be fun. After Helsinki, we will take a 1 or 2 hour boat ride across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn. I've been speaking to some of my Finnish friends here and asking them what to see, but most of them aren't too optimistic about their capital city. I think you really experience the Finnish culture if you're not in Helsinki where all of the tourism stuff is.
Yesterday I went to my first Russian movie at the theater. I thought it was really weird because you can't buy your tickets and sit down. You have to choose what row and seat you want to sit in as you buy your ticket and you have to sit in that spot….only after the movie has started can you move and sit in the seats that weren't purchased. Anyway, the movie was interesting….it was a chick flick and wasn't very long…plus I can't exactly agree with the morals (being that it was about a woman who was having an affair). I understood a decent amount of the movie. If I had a problem, I had Luba translate for me…but it was mainly self explanatory.
Also yesterday, St. Petersburg's soccer team (Zenit) won the championship over Moscow. I could care less about soccer, but the fact that St. Pete won meant that the whole city was in a drunken uproar. EVERY metro stop had parades of guys waving Zenit scarves and flags and yelling as loud as possible. Plus, I got to see a really cool fight in the metro. I watched it for a while until one guy was placed in a headlock…so I declared the winner in my head and decided to leave before things got worse.
You should really see McDonald's in this country. It's absolutely nuts. Every one you go to is packed. Russians are obsessed with this place. I asked my girlfriend why there are so many people in McDonald's….she just said that they love it for some reason. They know it's bad for them, but they can't resist it. It's not necessarily bad anyway…because these people will never be obese from it. They do so much walking every day to get their chores done that it is impossible. The weirdest thing is that they hire special people at McDonald's to throw your trash away. All you do is eat and leave your stuff on the table. So, my first time there I ate and threw my trash away on my tray. I walk back to my table where my friends are, and this little kid is staring at me. The mother looks at him and says in Russian, "Don't stare!" The fact that I threw my own trash away degraded me to a peasant apparently. So I told Luba that in America we don't have people that throw our trash away in McDonald's…we do it ourselves.She thought it was the weirdest thing. So she said, "Ha, my country is better. We have people that throw away our trash." And I just said, "No, that just means you're too lazy to do it yourself." J
Also what was really strange is when I went into a Pizza Hut. Russians consider this place a restaurant…not like, "Hey kids, we're going to Pizza Hut." It's more like, "Daddy got a raise! We're going to Pizza Hut!" You sit down and order your pizza with a menu…and there's a waitress that frequently checks on you. Plus, nobody was eating their pizza with their hands. Everyone ate it with forks and knives. It was odd.
Well I just got back from Finland and Estonia. They were both really fun. Finland is very pretty and very clean. It's amazing how much better people live there than in St. Pete and Helsinki being only 5 hours away. The city had about 500,000 people…so it's not very big, but it is a multicultural city. You have Finns that speak so many languages that it puts everyone else to shame. Every Finn is required to learn Swedish and English in school, and I believe they have to either choose another language to learn in college or extend their knowledge of one they already know. So, you could easily move there and have no problems whatsoever. Just about every sign you read is translated into 3 languages. We went to a movie theater. The movies were American but they had subtitles in Swedish and Finnish just for the 2 or 3 people in Finland who might not know English. Really, it's sad how many people know English there. But it's the major tourist city in Finland. The only sad thing is that when so many people learn English, they realize that it is more important in the world than their own language…being that only 5 million people in the world speak Finnish. And they usually prefer to speak the more popular language. Languages die that way, so it's sad. But the only bad thing about Finland is the Euro. I hate the Euro with a passion. The Euro is stronger than the dollar as it is and add on the fact that prices are jacked up just because it's a tourist city makes everything horribly expensive.
On Sunday we took a 4 hour huge ferry across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn, Estonia. I was very surprised by Tallinn. I had always thought that it was a Russian country…being very similar to Russia. But that was far from the truth. The only thing Russian there is the language and some food. The city was for the most part settled by Germans, so the architecture is all German. The city was very clean and slightly cheaper than Helsinki because of no Euro, but still expensive being a tourist city. The city was built in an interesting way. It's kind of built on a hill, where a long time ago the royalty lived in the upper section and the serfs lived in the lower section. And there's a huge wall that separates the upper and lower section. Serfs working for the royalty in the upper section would escape to the lower section for freedom. But, being that the lower section had different laws than the upper section, the royalty that came searching for their serfs in the lower section could be killed if they tried to bring their serf back. It's interesting because to kill royalty back then or to actually make them adhere to the laws was an amazing thing. But overall, Tallinn wasn't anything wonderful. It's definitely something to see in a day and then leave. I had a really great time. Helsinki is definitely a place to check out.
And the last thing: What is really funny about Estonia is that it's not a smart idea to speak Russian there being that it was a soviet state. They hate Russians and they are very proud of their independence from them.
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