do svidaniya, mama!

Because of the Victory Day holidays which fell right after my parents’ visit, I ended up having no classes to teach during the time that my parents were planning on going to Sweden for my father’s business trip.  My mother and I stumbled upon this fact while Skyping a couple of weeks before they came and before I knew it, I had a ticket to go with them! I’ve always really wanted to go to a Scandinavian country and getting back into EU territory for a little while sounded like paradise, so I was extremely excited to go.  I was not disappointed.

Here are a few of my favorite things about Sweden based on the four days that I spent there:

Lots of bikes – We spent some time in three different cities and no matter how big or small, all of them had bike paths woven throughout.

Lots of recycling – After living in Russia for nine months where recycling services are hard to come by (I’ve seen two bins in all of Tula), I was happy to see recycling bins along all the streets. 

The one pictured above even separated colored glass from clear glass.

Cool museums – The museum that I most wanted to see was Junibäcken in Stockholm, which was dedicated to the stories of Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking. 

The first and last rooms served as play spaces for children (and children at heart) inspired by Lindgren’s stories and in between was an “it’s a small world”-style ride through Lindgren’s world. 

I was a little too big for most of the play areas, but I managed to squeeze myself into a few places. 

It was neat to learn about some of the other stories that Lindgren wrote besides Pippi Longstocking. I was a major Pippi fan growing up and dressed up as her, wire-woven pigtails and all, for Halloween for about five years in a row in elementary school.  Nevertheless, I had never really heard about any of her other stories until I found out from my students this year that Lindgren’s story about Karlsson, a stout man that can fly, is the most popular one in Russia because there was an old Soviet cartoon made about him. The Swedes, of course, are familiar with even more of her stories. 

The second museum that we visited in Stockholm was the Vasa Museum, which is built around a giant recovered sunken ship from the seventeenth century.  The museum itself is huge with six levels displaying not only the ship, but everything found inside of it including everything from chamber pots to skeletons. 

There was so much to see that Mom and I had to take a meatball break in the museum’s cafe to get through it all.

The last cool museum that we visited was the Prison Museum in Gävle, a small town where we visited a former exchange student.  You can walk around the two museum buildings, which were used as prisons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Both have very entertaining audio guides and interesting exhibitions, but the prison from the seventeenth century was my favorite.  It was half-museum-half-haunted-house with the random creaks and door slams that echo through the building as you walk through it.

And it had a free bathroom. For some reason, that was the only thing that really frustrated me in Sweden – the lack of free public bathrooms.  Even at McDonalds, I had to pay to pee.

Language – Swedish, as it turns out, is one of the cutest languages ever (next to maybe Estonian).  It’s kind of like Adorable German.  For example…

flingor

plopp

slutstation (I guess you might not call this one “cute,” but amusing nevertheless)

I also loved that the typical way of saying “hello” is “hej” (hey).  It made me feel like everyone that I spoke with was already my friend, even if they were just the person selling my train ticket.

Subway art – My parents read somewhere that Stockholm’s subway was said to be one of the longest art galleries in the world because it is decorated with so much art.  Mom and I checked out one of the stops on my last day in Stockholm and it was pretty awesome.

Unique Benches – In general, Swedish design seems to be pretty stellar from their architecture to their fashion.  My parents and I were really impressed with their weird benches though.

Hotels – While the hotel that we stayed at in Västeros was lovely with its fancy breakfast buffet and sauna with a view overlooking the city, the hotels that stuck in my mind most were ones that we saw only from afar.  In Västeros, there was a tree house hotel…

… and an underwater hotel (the red dot in the distance).

Swedes – One evening we had a really nice dinner with one of my dad’s Swedish coworkers and his wife at their home in Västeras.  They were really sweet and it was really fun to hear them talk about Swedish history, taxes, and Eurovision. They also introduced us to a typical Swedish dessert called the marang-suisse (had to look it up to be sure, but that’s the one) made of meringue, bananas, vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and berries all mixed together – simple, but delicious! We also went to Gavle (where the prison museum was located) to spend some time with Anna, a previous exchange student in our area.

She showed us around her beautiful Hogwarts-like school and took us to a café where I enjoyed a huge green salad (without even a speck of mayonnaise!). 

She also told us a little more about this guy.

The city is apparently known for this dog-like, goat animal that they build every year out of straw around Christmas (but apparently it always gets burned down by some hooligan). According to my wikipedia search, apparently, the real thing looks like this.

Overall, I got a great impression of Sweden from the time I spent there and it was the perfect place to escape to re-energize before finishing up my last month in Tula, which is now coming to a close. More on the remaining fun-filled May adventures soon!

So after a crazy week at Eurofest in St. Petersburg, I got in to Tula by train around 5:30 in the morning, taught two classes at the university, and then got right back on an elektrichka (a smaller train that goes to local destinations) and headed out to Moscow to embark on a new adventure. After years of talking about it, my parents were finally making the trip out to visit me in Russia.  Luckily, everything with their arrival went pretty smoothly everyone made it to Russia in one piece.  Their two stuffed suitcases were a little challenging to get through the metro, but being a girl, who under no circumstances should ever be caught lifting heavy things, I managed to score some help from a random male citizen.  Mother was highly amused.

We killed some time before our train eating lunch at MuMu, a cafeteria-style Russian chain restaurant with complimentary condensed milk candies, hitting up a nice bench in the park (jet lag hit my parents pretty hard there), and meeting quickly with Stas, a friend of the family that we knew from when he was studying in NC as a high school exchange student. Then we bid farewell to Moscow for a few days and headed to Tula for a taste of “real Russia.”

Because they came to Tula as tourists rather than as guests of the university, they weren’t allowed to stay with me at the dorm/hotel, so they stayed at the “Grand Hotel” just down the street from me.  I think it must be pretty new because most of the people I talked to here had no idea that it existed.  To my relief, it turned out to be lovely and they even brought happy breakfasts to their room. 

Unfortunately, those breakfasts did not come with coffee, so most of our days began with a trip to the McDonalds down the street for McCafe coffee.  For the three days that they were there, we did a lot of walking as I attempted to show them all the main points of interest in Tula. Along the way, we visited:

– our main street, Prospekt Lenina

- our main squares, Revolution Square

… and Lenin Square

– the Kremlin

– the Samovar Museum

– Yasnaya Polyana: On Tuesday, we took a bus to Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana. 

Even though it’s another ten- or fifteen-minute walk probably down to the actual entrance after you get off the bus, a Russian girl managed to make the entire trek in high heels.  Mother again was highly amused. 

Yasnaya was beautiful as always.  While I’ve been there a number of times during all different times of the year, it never loses its charm.

After walking around and paying our respects at Tolstoy’s grave, we stumbled upon some guys grilling and selling shashlik outside the entrance and did lunch there. 

– Central Park: We also did some strolling around the central park, which is probably my favorite place here. 

We wound up eating at an outdoor café there where I’d never eaten before, but it turned out pretty good. 

We enjoyed our blinyi, solyanka, and okroshka while listening to “live” music (… minus real instruments. Basically, it was just someone hired to sing karaoke.  For some reason, they do that a lot here.).

Other things that my mother was amused by in “real” Russia included: the way girls link arms when they’re walking, 32-card decks, clay animal whistles in which you have to blow through the tail, men’s fashion, and making the bus conductors uncomfortable by smiling at them (One of them responded with a kind of twitching at the corners of her mouth and Mom considered it a victory.).  Father, on the other hand, got a kick out of seeing an advertisement for his company, ABB, on the side of a bus.

And before we knew it, it was Thursday and time to head back to Moscow for a few days.

The first thing we did after getting settled in our hotel was head to the Kremlin to try and see St. Basil’s and Lenin’s waxy bod.  Unfortunately, being that we were there from May 3-5, Red Square was closed due to preparations for Victory Day, a gigantic celebration of the Russian victory in WWII.  Nevertheless, we peeked through the gates and waved to St. Basil’s from afar. 

Other ways we occupied ourselves included:

- exploringOld Arbat

- Honey Fair: I had heard about this from a friend somewhere along the lines and so when I saw a poster advertising it in the metro, I was determined to go. 

They had free buses from the metro and signs everywhere so it was surprisingly painless to get there.  And it was totally worth the trip.  They had different types of honey from all over Russia – I didn’t even know that there were so many different varieties!  We sampled so many types of honey by the time we’d made our rounds that we were a bit honeyed out at the end.

While we didn’t end up buying any actual honey, I did get some medovukha (honey wine) to bring back for myself.

- the Moscow River

- Souvenir shopping at Izmailovskiy

- Museum of Modern Art: I had been to the outside of this museum before (which is pretty cool in itself), but never been inside, so I didn’t really know what to expect.  I’m no art expert and I don’t visit art museums very often, but this turned out to be one of the coolest ones that I have ever been in. 

There were rooms with video projections, a dark room with pillow-covered floor, a room filled with stacks of bottles filled with different fabrics.  I was highly impressed.

- Georgian food: I headed back to a café that I had been to with the other Russian Fulbrighters, and we tried khachapuri (cheese bread) and khinkali (Georgian dumplings). 

- Stas & Friends: On our last night in Moscow, we met up again with our friend Stas for drinks near the center and he introduced us to several of his friends.  The pictures speak for themselves.

It was a fun night.

Getting my parents to the airport the next morning was a bit of an adventure.  Our hotel turned out to be at the complete opposite side of the city from the airport from which they were departing, but since we had so much trouble getting through the metro with our luggage on their arrival, we decided to take a taxi.  As luck would have it, there was a huge accident on our way (a pretty bad one too.. the car was so scorched, poking it would probably have reduced it to a pile of ash), so the trip ended up taking way longer than any of us had expected. The cab driver scolded me a little for not anticipating the traffic (which, to be quite I honest, I deserved), but assured me that he had had dropped off passengers before who were much later than we were and they still made it onto their flights (I’m not sure how exactly he found that out, but it made me feel better anyway). In the end, he was right though and they made it onto their flight in time.

After seeing off my parents, I went all the way back to the other airport at the other side of the city and got ready for my flight to Sweden, where I would join my parents again for another five days of fun. More on that to come!

Last year when I applied for the Fulbright scholarship, I proposed a side project to jumpstart an Odyssey of the Mind program, an international creative problem-solving competition with which I’ve been heavily involved, in the city where I was placed. While writing my project proposal, I discovered that by some strange stroke of luck (or perhaps fate), the Odyssey of the Mind Eurofest 2012 would be held in St. Petersburg, Russia.  At that point, I was determined that if I received the grant, I would find a way to go.  Last week, nearly a full year later, that idea became reality.

First of all, if you don’t know what Odyssey of the Mind is, take a minute to look around their website here – (it’s an amazing program and I encourage everyone to get involved). Originally thinking that I lacked experience as a competition judge, I had applied to be an official volunteer rather than a judge.  Nevertheless, by another stroke of luck, on the evening of the first night, I was notified that there were a couple of open spots in the judging team and that, if I wanted ins, I could have one of them.  And just like that, I became a style judge for the classical problem (my third stroke of luck), the one that I was most familiar with, having attempted to solve it with my “team” (thought it turned out to be more of a class, I suppose) back in Tula.

While I’ve participated in Odyssey in the United States since I was in the fourth grade, Eurofest was unique to any competition that I’d ever been to before.  First of all, since Eurofest is always held in a European city, Americans (as the name would suggest) are in the minority and there is a much more balanced representation of participating countries.  While the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals competition always attracts a vast number of international teams, it always takes place in the States and, therefore, is mostly dominated by Americans.  At Eurofest, however, you are almost always guaranteed to be in a room with someone from a different country.  This year’s Eurofest, for instance, brought in teams and officials from Russia, Poland, Belarus, Switzerland, USA, Moldova, India, and Germany among others. 

Second, there is less emphasis on the long-term and spontaneous components of the tournament and more on a unique aspect of the festival, the Mix problem.  At the beginning of the weeklong competition, each team is assigned to work with two other teams from different countries in solving the “mix problem,” which is the same for all the teams.  This year, for instance, the problem (or criteria for their eight-minute skit) was to tell the story of a town that creates a “New Patron” (or monument guard) to replace the “Old Patron,” who has grown obsolete.  The team also had to show the New Patron protecting itself somehow from vandalism and honor it with some kind of celebration (most teams put together some kind of dance number). Each group of teams then has the first three days of competition to create their solution to present at a given time on the last day of competition (Thursday).  For many of the kids, it is their first opportunity to truly interact with people from different countries and they must learn to overcome obstacles such as language barriers and cultural differences while working together to showcase their unique mixture of talents and creativity.  Suffice it to say, watching the results on Thursday was nothing short of amazing.

For me personally, however, the week at Eurofest was special because of the fantastic group of people that I got to meet.  Just as our group of Russian Fulbrighters naturally became very close due to our somewhat unique shared passion for Russia, the group of officials at Eurofest clicked because of a unique passion for Odyssey and creativity. While most of the judges had met one another before at previous Eurofests or national competitions, I came to Petersburg knowing no one.  Everyone was so incredibly friendly and welcoming, however, that this was never a problem.  Even the policeman who was called to our room by the grumpy floor monitor lady on the first night couldn’t resist smiling with these charmers.

What’s more it was fascinating to hear about how each of them had become involved with Odyssey in their own ways - some had started out as team members, others as coaches, and one had even started by volunteering to be a security guard at a local tournament.  In OotM, the word “spirit” gets thrown around a lot (spirit of the problem, team spirit, spirit of creativity, etc.).  After Eurofest in St. Petersburg, I once again found myself grasping for this word to describe magical sensations that I felt there.  No matter how diverse the personalities and cultures, everyone seemed to be intoxicated by the same lively spirit (and not just because of the organization’s seemingly limitless collection of champagne bottles).  I think that shared international spirit of excitement, inspiration, and creativity is a big part of what made the festival so remarkable for those involved and I couldn’t be more grateful have been granted the opportunity to be possessed by it as well.   

So, yes, this post should have debuted in January. And we’re now nearing the end of April. I’m a little behind. But better late than never, right? YES. On to leg three (as you can see, this trip is not bipedal)…

The final stop on our Tour de Middle East was the Promised Land - Israel.  Our plan was to take an overnight bus from Cairo to Taba, where we would walk across the country border to Eilat, Israel, and finally, catch a bus from Eilat to Jerusalem.  And, for the most part, that’s what happened.  After booking it to the bus station in Eilat, however, we found that the Jerusalem bus we had planned to take was full and had to wait for another couple of hours for the next one.  Fortunately, the weather was lovely, so we spent the extra time trying Israel bourekas (pastries, which until I looked it up on the internet just now, I thought were pronounced “boikuses”), ogling at the number of young people walking around with huge guns,….

…. and taking in some (much missed) rays. 

And then, before we knew it, we were off to Jerusalem.

On the bus, I ended up sitting next to a “talker” from New York, who was also visiting Israel for the first time.  What I had expected to be a couple of hours of quality time with my iPod turned into a fairly deep conversation about travel and experiencing the world while you’re young.  He had apparently taught English in Brazil after college and was pretty nostalgic about his own nomadic days exploring South America.  He said he had made a plan to spend his twenties seeing and experiencing as many things as possible, while his thirties would be his time for getting a permanent job, settling down, etc.  Interestingly, we learned that Israeli students also start preparing for careers at a later age than we do in the states.  Most serve in the military after regular schooling and then take a year or so to travel after its completion, so they usually don’t begin university studies until their early twenties.  I was intrigued by the idea of getting practical life experience before going to university as in America we are so used to the typical school-college-job pathway.

In Israel, I couch surfed for the first time ever and had an extremely positive experience.  In Jerusalem, we stayed with some university students who offered us tea made with fresh herbs, gave us helpful suggestions about where we could get the best views of the city (like from the Mount of Olives, pictured below),…

…. and showed us their very own stop-motion films (one was studying animation).  Best of all, they made me an eye patch (out of the same material they had used to make a toilet seat cover) to wear when I lost a contact lens and was temporarily blind in one eye. 

They even gave me a sword to match.

We spent our first day in Jerusalem in the Old City, where we wound up getting a “free” tour around all the major religious sights from a guy that worked in one of the souvenir shops. 

Prayers tucked into the Wailing Wall.

Light-up decorations at the Stations of the Cross - this just felt wrong to me somehow…

Even though the guide was pretty sketchy, grabbing us complimentary magnets or chocolate bars from random kiosks (“It’s okay – everyone knows me here!”), we didn’t end up having to pay him anything. 

Got this little guy fo’ free!

So I guess the only cost were our feelings of security that we weren’t being scammed throughout the day.  We eventually escaped by promising to come back and visit him the next day. Needless to say, we avoided Old City for the rest of our time in Jerusalem.

From Jerusalem, we rented a car to drive to Tel Aviv, so that we could stop at the Masada fortress and the Dead Sea along the way.  After riding mostly in buses, trains, or planes to get from place to place, it was liberating to be back in a car again (though I refused to drive – driving in an unfamiliar country terrifies me). 

Masada, while having an incredible view and fascinating history, was kind of ruined (no pun intended) for me by my poor decision to wear just my one contact lens instead of my glasses. 

The view from the top.

Since my vision is pretty terrible (for my eyes on their own, the world’s just a bunch of fuzzy shapes and colors), I started getting nauseous, exhausted, and had to spend all my concentration on not falling down the uneven stairs, having basically zero depth perception.

Guess I should have worn the eye patch.

Kristen and James had a good time climbing around, at least.

After Masada, we pulled off on the side of the road and stripped down into our bathing suits to have a dip in the Dead Sea.  Getting down to the water felt kind of like walking on Mars until we got to the shore, which to my feet’s great surprise was incredibly sharp due the salt. 

But it was all worth it once we got into the water.  The Dead Sea is so salty that it’s practically impossible not to float (don’t ask me to explain the physics behind it, it just is).  It’s even kind of difficult to swim because your whole body just keeps bobbing up to the top the whole time. 

I didn’t bring my camera for fear of dropping it in the sea, so I stole these pics from James via Kristen’s blog, which you can (and should) read here.

Not that you’d really want to go underneath – I just barely got some of the salt water splashed up my nose and it stung like crazy.  The scenery was fantastic though and definitely one of those moments that you never forget.

Our last stop on our way to Tel Aviv was in Bethlehem, where we stuffed ourselves with freshly made baklava and some kind of sweet cheese pastries (they were crazy popular with the locals) as well as probably the most delicious shawarma (a type of wrap with specially grilled meat) we’d ever tasted.  

On our way out, we scoped out all the protest graffiti on the West Bank barrier wall.

And, at last, we made it to our final destination, the beautiful and sunny city of Tel Aviv.  Once again we were fortunate to stay with fabulous Couchsurfers, who not only allowed us to take over their living room, but also took the time to take us around town to the beach,…

…. historical sites,

Like Jaffa, an ancient port city.

Or an outdoor gym (all the machines can be used just with the user’s body weight)

….. and markets,….

…. feed us local food,….

Jachnun, Yemeni rolls of dough with spicy tomato sauce

Sabich, pita with fried eggplant and hardboiled eggs

Halva ice cream cone (okay, so the halva scoop is actually hidden under the chocolate one)

… and cooked Shashlikh with us at their apartment among many other things.

In general, Tel Aviv gave me an Orbit gum good, clean feeling -  there were public recycling bins all around (there are only two that I know of in Tula), dog walkers everywhere, trees and parks along the streets, and an extremely convenient bike rental system (like Zipcars with bicycles – I’ve heard they have them in some cities in the US now..). 

And I don’t know, maybe it was just the sun, but, in general, people just seemed happy there! The only downside that I repeatedly heard from those we spoke with was that prices there are pretty high.  There was even a huge demonstration that started last year because of a price rise in cottage cheese! Noam, one of the Couchsurfers that we stayed with, told me the story one night while we were walking around the city and we stopped in a grocery store to pay a visit to the “white cheese that started it all.”

And soon before we knew it, it was time to bundle ourselves back into our jackets and scarves and head back to Russia.  That was in January, but I still think about those two weeks all the time.  As I travel, I tend to remember cities in the same way that I remember people, each with their own personality traits and peculiarities.  While each of these four cities were vastly different from one another, I fell in love with each of them for different reasons – Istanbul for its colorful streets and personalities, Cairo for its constant vitality and unpredictability, Jerusalem for its intriguing mixture of the old and new, and Tel Aviv for its energetic and youthful spirit.  In my experience, you can only understand so much about a place by reading about it or hearing about it on the news.  While I only got to spend a short time with each of these cities, the personal connections that I now have with them has drastically remolded my everyday perceptions of them. Somehow each city isn’t just a mark on a map anymore, but rather becomes something much more, well, human.

And THAT is why I love travel.