Sunny Old England...!?!

'Ello, 'Ello, 'Ello,

Have now been in England for 5 days and the strangest thing is happening: there has been no rain. It has been sunny and over 30 degrees since we arrived. VERY, VERY odd. Apparently there was lots of rain and huge thunderstorms just before we arrived but it's been sun-tanning weather ever since we got here.

All the Brits are cooking in this hot weather, and B and I are getting worried about how the heck we are going to handle Cyprus, Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East in August, if we can even handle the British summer!

Then again, if things keep progessing in the Middle East as they have been for the past couple of weeks there may not be a Middle East for us to go in in August....

Anyway, England has been treating us very well and we have been having lots of fun seeing sights in London and playing Scrabble with my Aunt Valerie!

Couple of pics are below and we are off to Scotland in a couple of days, so should have some more adventures to load on here soon.

TK
















- Picadilly Circus

- Westminister Cathedral

NeverForgettable Norway

Sorry about the title; I wracked my brains for literally HOURS (okay fine, literally about 1 minute) trying to think of positive and appropriate adjectives that begin with 'N'.... Julia, you will not be surprised to hear that Norway is lovely. You will have a wonderful time when you are here. But. Start saving now! It is stupid expsensive. Like $13CAD for a beer stupid expensive! Like $4.50 for a plain black coffee stupid expenseive. How I missed my Tim's! We went to three places in Norway: Olso, Bergen and Finse. Olso and Bergen were very nice and picturesque cities and I would recommend anyone to go there. But far and away the highlight of the time in Norway was the four days in Finse (prounced as two syllables - 'Fin-Say'.) Finse is a small town in the middle of Noway, in the mountains between Olso and Bergen, located at 1222 metres above sea level - the highest rail station point in the country. Now, when I say 'small town' I mean it. It goes even beyond the records held by Williamstown in the rankings of small towns accross our fair globe. The permanent population of Finse is 4. Yup 4. It swells to about 20 or 30 full time summer residents, and when the tourists come flocking, it explodes to a whopping one or two hundred. This, coming from the hoards and masses that comprise Moscow, St. Petersburg and Olso, was such a welcome relief. There were hardly any houses and because it was high up in the mountains the air was clean (no pollution) and the water was pure and delicious. Now, you may be asking yourselves why we chose to go to a town in the middle of Norway with a population of 4! Well, we had an 'in'! A wonderous and wonderful Norwegian fellow by the name of Toby used to study in Vancouver. While studying in Vancouver he became friends wtih Brad's cousin Risha. One fun and booze filled night out at the Trap & Gill when we were all present, we mentioned to Toby that we were planning on heading to Norway in July and he said that we should come to Finse and he would put us up for a few days. We gratefully accepted the offer at the time, and after finding out just how crazy expensive Norway is, we were REALLY grateful! And that's how we ended up in Finse. Now, Finse is a bit of a haven for out-door enthusiasts. All kinds of fit, healthy and robust Norwegians were wandering around the hills and vales of Finse; and us poor un-fit Canadians were not left to wallow in lazyness. oh no. On our first full day in Finse we climbed a glacier. After all, why not? Who doesn't go on a 7 hour hike and climb a glacier just for fun on the spur of the moment? On our second day in Finse, we went on a 60 (yes 60: 6 x 10, really 60) kilometre bike ride. The ride went from Finse to a place called Flam, which is were a very beautiful and famous Norwegian fjord ends. As many of you know, I have always wanted to see a Norwegian Fjord and I am very happy to say that I have finally not just seen one, but acutally jumped into it!!!!! The water was so f)((^(&^*^%&^$^£%^$(^ing cold that I only lasted about 1 minute before hauling myself out, but at least it numbed my poor hurting behind for a while. 60 kilometres on a rough track over about 6 zillion big rocks and stones is NOT a whole lot of fun the next day when you have to sit down... Our remaining time in Finse was spent moaning over sore muscles, drinking copious amounts of liquor to ease the aforementioned sore muscles and listening to a variety of Norwegian funk, folk, rock and classical music. Then it was off to Bergen for some sightseeing. And after a day or two there we hopped a flight to Jolly Olde England, which is were I am writing from now. More on the UK is coming soon. Meanwhile enjoy the photos! TK

- Brad and me in front of a very nice troll/gnome creature in Bergen

- Farewell party in Finse; our every so wonderful host and guide - Toby - is in the blue shirt.




- The start of our 60km bike ride








- Me. Rapelling down a glacier!











- Me. Climbing back up the glacier. (Much, much harder!)

- A particularly beautiful Norwegian waterfall

- Brad, Danika, me, and Ola: ready to climb a glacier!

- There is a statue park in Oslo. It's full of naked statues. It is very surreal.

- More naked in the statue park

- The Olso Peace Centre. Wendy and Julia - You ABSOLUTELY must visit this place. Everyone else you ABSOLUTELY should visit this place. So well done. It was fantastic.

The Hermitage

- Faust: see if you can see the devil above his right shoulder.

- Mary Magdelaine
- Hallway just inside the museum

- Palace Square and the front of the Hermitage

Mother Russia Has Gone Shopping

- Brad and me outside the Studencheski Cafe in St. Petersburg. Daiken - I hope your ears were burning, because we had a piva for you while there:)

- Fond Memories of the Hotel Anglaterre... - Check out this prime example of the man-purse! - Beer with Danika, myself, Brad and our friends Nicolas, and Mila - Ad for Rolex the size of a football field or 6 - This car is actually parked here. It's not moving. The driver is long gone. The car is parked half on the sidewalk...

Hello faithful readers, Please forgive the ever so long delay since my last update to this Beautific Blog. My excuse is that I got kiddnapped by leprecauns in St. Petersburg and was taken to their leader in Guatemala where I was supposed to make baskets all day. However, I soon realized that if I allowed my captors to carry out this dasterdly plan that I would never be able to keep in touch with you all. So I devised a daring escape plan involving rope, leaves from the Guatamalen Chew-Chew tree and a pet monkey, and I ran away from my leprecaun captors. Now I am back on track and I hope not to get get kidnapped in such a way again, so I don't take so long between this update and the next....

Now, onto the real stuff.

My last blog left you all in Volgograd. After having lots o' fun drinking over breakfast and dancing up a storm at the wedding, we hopped a surprisingly comfortable Aeroflot flight back to Moscow. We spent a couple of day sightseeeing there, and then moved on to the ever so lovely St. Petersburg. In Petersburg we went to the Hermitage (a few photos of some of the most incredible pieces of art are included on the next Blog Update - please look closely at the picuture of Faust because just above his head you can just make out a devil figure - sooooo incredible).

Lindz - just for you I climbed all 280 steps up St Isaac's cathedral to the very top so I could take a photo of the Hotel Anglaterre:) To recover from the long climb, I had a relaxing beer and coffee at my absolute, most totally, favourite bar/pub in the world - Cafe Idiot - they give you a free shot of vodka with your order. A highly endearing habit, I would say! I highly recommend that everyone goes to Cafe Idiot at least once in their lives.

Here is a list of my observations of Modern Russia based on this, most recent, visit.

1) Capitalism comes to Russia

You can shop like in North America now - you can walk around a store and touch the goods and read the price tags. You don't have to look at the items behind glass cases and ask a mean and unfriendly clerk to help you. However, Russians like to do things on a large scale. So when they decided to run with this whole fun concept of capitalism they went full out. Please notice the photo above of the Rolex Adverisement. This ad is located immediately at the Entrance of Red Square, a mere hundred or so metres from Lenin's Mausoleum. It is at LEAST a football field in length! Ads like this are everywhere.

2) Mother Russia Has Gone Shopping.

My previous theory regarding Mother Russia, was that she was a bitch with a bad sense of humour. This was because she kept doing mean things to me while I lived there. Now, however, things have changed. I don't think she has become nicer; however, she is conspicuously absent from her old haunts. She barely thwarted us on this trip at all. I think the reason for this is that she has joined the booming middle class in Russia and has gone to the massive IKEA outlet (seriously, this shop is so big a whole normal sized mall would fit inside) on the outskirts of Moscow.

3) And yet...Russia is still a bit odd.

The women are all beautiful and were short skirts and high heels everywhere and anywhere. The men are still not-so-beautiful and wear man-purses. Not a plastic bag or a briefcase, but acutal man-purses - see photo above. The men for some reason are also really, really fond of the mullet. It is making a huge comeback in Moscow. We even has a Mullet-Faux-Hawk Sighting one day!

That's it for Russia.

Now on to Norway.

TK

Breakfast in Volgograd

- This is Vovik; Olga's uncle and a very gregarious fellow to say the least!


- Brad and Andreas on a Lenin Statue in Vologograd

- Truly an amazing Statue. She is called Mama Kurgan. She is about 50 feet high and is absolutely stunning.

- The bride and groom.

- Danika, Brad and myself with the fast talking, hard drinking grandparents of Olga


So little time has passed since my last update, but so much has happened...where to begin, where to begin...

Let's start with an update on the baggage situation, as I know you all have been chewing your nails in complete distress about the fact that poor little TK had no clean clothes to wear. Well, you can all take deep breath and sigh with relief, because we have been happily re-united with our backpacks. Mine showed up after 24 hours; Brad's must have REALLY liked London, because it decided to hang out there for an extra day and only showed up on Friday. But, whew! What a relief it was to see the bag when it finally arrived:)

Now that you can stop worrying about our clothing situation, we can move on to stories about our time in Volgograd. (As I think I mentioned before, we were there for our friends Olga and Andreas' wedding.) Volgograd, as many of you history buffs out there will know, was formerly Stalingrad, and was the site of one of the most sigificant battles of WWII. (Go watch 'Enemy at the Gates' if you don't know what I'm talking about). The museum of the battle of Stalingrad was fascinating! But, what was arguably more fascinating was our visit with Olga's family.

We were staying at Olga's grandparents' apartment as they were out at their dacha*. It was very nice, as far as Krhuschev era apartment blocks go... which is only about 2 feet...but still, it was, of course, very generous of them to let us stay there. We got there late Thursday night. On Friday we toured around the city and the wedding was on Saturday. We didn't plan to get up too early on Saturday, as we didn't have to meet the family to head off to the wedding until about 10. As I've mentioned, it was just me, Brad and Danika at the apartment because the grandparents were at the dacha. We were told they were planning to come to the wedding, but had no need to come to the apartment. So, needless to say, we were not expecting them, let alone at 7 o'clock on Saturday morning. Nevertheless, 7 am saw them ringing the doorbell about 15 times until we woke up and stumbled to the door to let them in.

Initial communcations did not go smoothly as our Russian is a bit rusty (having barely used it for 3 years...), and we were still half asleep, and it was 7 am, and the grandparents were old and had no teeth (all gold fillings; very bizzare) so they were a wee bit difficult to understand! Good times indeed. Things got better when they decided to make us breakfast. They put out the fancy china and nice tea cups and nice crystal glasses and served us bread with caviar, which Brad and I, being vegetarian, couldn't eat. (Not that Bababushka &Dedushka** could grasp the concept of vegetarianism; I think they just thought we were weird foriegners on some kind of no-caviar diet). They then offered us red wine to drink...

Sure, we said, it's 8 am,we're eating breakfast; seems like the perfect time for a nice glass of Soviet era red wine... They poured the wine for me and Danika, and then Deduskha asked Brad if he'd like to try some 'white'. Assuming by 'white' he meant white wine, Brad said sure, why not. Then old, Russian, Dedushka, type person breaks out a bottle of room temperature vodka, pours himself and Brad a glass full each - note: this is not a shot glass, this is a nice, large, cut cyrstal glass. Brad, not accustomed to drinking full glasses of luke warm vodka at 8 am, cautiously sipped at the vodka. Deduska, however, preceeded to pound back the glass of vodka in one quick shot while Brad, Danika and I stared in amazement, checked our watches; yup - still 8 am! To make it even better, the Babuskha pounded back her full glass of horrific red wine at the same speed and then started to pick on me and Danika for not drinking fast enough! It was a very, very surreal start to our morning.

The rest of the day was very nice and comparatively normal. We got on a bus with all Olga's ever so friendly family and drove out to the River Volga (very big, very famous river in southern Russia) and went on an afternoon long cruise along the river. The boat docked for a few hours on a lovely white sand beach where we played soccer - I scored the winning goal for my team; very proud was I! - and suntanned and stuff like that. On the cruise back to the pier, we had a nice wedding dinner and drank lots and lots and lots and lots of vodka, beer, champagne, etc, etc, toasting the happy couple. All very nice indeed. On Sunday we flew back to Moscow, where we will play tourist for a couple of days.



Our next adventure will be the over-night train to Petersburg on Tuesday and I will try to make sure something entertaining happens so I can tell you all about it.

Later all
TK

*dacha = summer cottage for Russians
** Babushka & Deduska = Grandmother & Grandfather

Ahhh Mother Russia

Well, well, well.

The good news is that Brad, Danika*, and I have made it to Moscow. The bad news is that Brad's and my backpacks enjoyed London so much that they decided to stay there rather than joining us here. (D'oh!) Brad's and my flight landed early, which would have been fantastic but for the fact that the plane ahead of us at the unloading bay got stuck to the tunnel thing that connects the plane to the airport, so we had to sit on the tarmac for 65 minutes (yes, over an hour), while they called the handyman to un-stick the plane... This 65 minute delay made our 1 hour and 55 minute connection from Heathrow's terminal 1 to terminal 4 very, very tight. We actually made the transit in 40 minutes, running the whole way! A new record I think, but those Flighties out there reading this entry, I don't recommend that you put paxes on a 40 minute connection time through LHR; I was pretty cranky by the time we got there. And, as I say, our bags did not.

So, I have been wearing the same clothes for over 72 hours.

Yes; I am smelly.

Nevertheless, I am very, very happy to be back in the Rodina**. From the looks of things, Russia has become much more modern. Capitalism has taken hold with a vengence, and there are huge, colourful advertisements everywhere. The people seem to be a bit nicer than they used to be as well; the person who helped us at the airport with regard to the whole lack of luggage thing actually tried to be helpful rather than being rude and cranky!!! For anyone whose been to Russia, they will know what a pleasant surprise this was. Now let's just see if we actually get the bags...

The 'Sighting of the Day' for today was seeing a woman sitting, reading a book in a porta-potty, with the door propped open. No, she was not using the porta-potty; her job was to sit there all day and charge people 10 rubles to use the other porta-potty. I wanted to take a picture, but thought that might be considered rude...

We are off to Volgograd late this evening for our friends Olga and Andreas' wedding; should be loads of fun. I will be sure to get some happy photos of me in clean clothes and put them up on the blog soon.

Later y'all,
TK

*Brad's 18 year old sister who has never travelled internationally before.
** Russian for 'the Motherland'

24 Hours

24 hours to go.

This is (almost) unbelievable. 18 months of deliberating, planning, and saving and Departure Day is (almost) upon us.

It's July 3rd and we hop on a flight tommorrow to begin the Round-the-World adventure.

I hope to have enough adventures to keep you all entertained, but not so many that I can't come back in 6 months to show y'all the photos!

I'll write again after we land in Russia... I am quite sure that Mother Russia has some specially horrific plan to welcome us back to the Rodina, so my first post outside of Canada should be a good one!

TJK