We escaped to the West via train from St Petersburg.  Helsinki, while not the most exciting of that unexceptional genre of Nordic cities, certainly did awfully well from the comparison.  It was nice to be able to drink the water and flush the toilet paper

We just sort of strolled about for a few days.  They have a chuch in a rock.  Their chain of liquor stores is called "Alko".  I had a birthday.  We shopped a lot, as I searched out tourist wares referencing Finns (for one small nephew who was fascinated with the idea of a land of hims).  We caught the ferry out to Suomenlinna and wandered around in the rain; Yammy laughed at my rain hat until he got rain in his ear.

It was all rather lovely, and not at all grim despite my mother's research and subsequent predictions.  But we couldn't leave fast enough, because although I'd never heard the real version, due to somebody's continual repetition of it, I had Monty Python's damn "Finland" song stuck in my head and worried it would become permanent.

Yammy's fun to take travelling.  He's easy-going, flexible, puts up with my crap, appreciates the afternoon nap break, can peer over the crowd to find things.  I figured he'd be a good companion for a trip around the Baltic, even if he wouldn't be as useful language-wise as he had been last summer during our jaunt around the Adriatic.

Turns out he was totally handy. His Cyrillic education may have terminated in Grade 4 due to a certain secession, but being fluent in a Slavic language was ridiculously helpful.  It was funny to watch - he'd slowly sound out a word, then try mapping it to Croatian.  That worked most of the time, but otherwise, he'd try English, then the French/Romance connection via Italian, before finally giving Latin a go.  I'd make him read stuff just for the entertainment value.  "What's that say?" "How about that?"  "And that one?" 

They should put it in Lonely Planet: When travelling to Russia, take a Slav.

Being in Russia itself felt like a big deal.  The visa stuff certainly helped and the funny picture characters; there was just such of sense of being on the other side of the curtain.  We spent a lot of time saying "Dude.  We're in Russia."

St Petersburg was brilliant.  The city's population is one of its most interesting aspects.  We had been warned that we'd see a lot of men wearing their sunglasses on the backs of their heads, hooked over the ears.  Disappointingly, we didn't see this at all (at least, not until just one instance on our very last day), but the prevalence of mullets certainly compensated.  There was also significant representation by the marvelously badly dressed.  (Incidentally, when I was taking a few brief notes for this post, Yammy wanted me to include commentary on how some wardrobe choices made distinguishing between socio-economic tiers and occupations challenging, but as he did so by pointing to my page and exclaiming "Whores!", I'm going to decline.)  

Our hotel was fairly centrally located.  Basically, if Catherine the Great was still living in the Winter Palace, she would have been our neighbour.  On our first afternoon, we went for a walk.  We meandered down our street, under the arch and into Palace Square.  They were constructing a big stage there, so we figured it probably had something to do with the upcoming White Nights Festival.  When I finally noticed the name on the billowing banner, I started to laugh in disbelief.  You see, Yammy is a little bit of a Pink Floyd fan.  He flew to LA specifically for a David Gilmour concert, so it seemed almost ridiculous that we happened to be in St Petersburg, staying about 50 metres from where Roger Waters was setting up shop.  It became even more ridiculous the next night when somehow we just strolled past the security, into the square and caught the whole concert.

Me, I really only know the words to "Comfortably Numb" thanks to the Scissor Sisters and Dar Williams, so I wasn't the core fan-base, but it was still pretty damn sweet standing in midnight twilight, looking up at the Winter Palace, listening to Roger Waters play "Another Brick in the Wall".

We wandered all about St Petersburg.  The Church on Spilled Blood was a highlight - ice-cream-cake onion domes on the outside, bright mosaic cartoons on the inside.  We tried to go to Peterhof, but after making us sit in a boat on the Neva for two hours, they decided that as Medvedev and his International Economic Forum friends were there, we shouldn't be.  It was just like our Venice Three Hour Tour.

Of course, we did the Hermitage.  As with visiting any museum housed in a re-purposed building, we spent a lot of time backtracking, mainly down two corridors - one where our guidebook promised we'd find a portrait of Catherine the Great dressed as a dude (we didn't) and the 1812 Gallery.  This latter is filled with over 300 paintings of officers and heroes of the Napoleonic Wars.  I'd like to say say we spent our time there acknowledging their courage and sacrifices, but mostly we made fun of their hair.

Still, I'm disappointed that I missed the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography - it apparently has Peter the Great's collection of deformed babies, which sounds fascinating.  Yammy baulked - he doesn't like to be described as "squeamish" but then he also doesn't like "whinging little girl".  Apparently the correct term is "hypersensitive to the idea that people have squishy insides."  This son of a surgeon made me go to the Nabokov Museum instead.

I've had trouble writing this post.  Two main reasons, I think.  The first is that Iceland pretty much defies description.  It's weird and interesting and incredibly unique.  (So unique that apparently it can give an absolute qualifiers...)  And it's very pretty.  Smells funny, sort of boiled eggs and fish, but very pretty.  We saw glaciers, waterfalls, volcano craters, lava fields, pumice beaches, thermal vents, geysirs and the odd continental rift.  And we avoided eating puffins or rotten shark (though I hear the latter is quite tasty).

The second reason I'm having trouble with this post is that I need to admit something that I'm not very proud of.  When we were in Reykjavik, an earthquake clocking in at a mighty 6.3 on the Richter scale hit about 50 kilometers away.  And we didn't notice.

Here's the thing.  Poland is there.  I'd never been there.  So I went to Poland.

I didn't really want to go to Warsaw, but that's where the cheap flight went, so so did I.  Warsaw is...um...there.  Though I want to know why they (and Prague and Barcelona) get a Sephora and swanky posh Copenhagen misses out.

I then caught the train to Kraków.  The trip was in turns interesting, dull, gross, creepy and educational. These were due to, respectively: crossing a great swathe of Poland, an overabundance of grey Communist architecture, the lunch choices of my fellow passengers, the weird dude who alternated between scratching himself and embroidering, and the little girl who taught me to count to ten in Polish.  The little brat already knew how to do it in English, and didn't seem interested in Danish, French or Italian, so the tutorial remained unidirectional.

The return trip a few days later wasn't much better though it was enlivened by the Window Wars between the Old Italian Ladies and the Young Polish guys.  I sided with the young guys, I wanted the damn thing open, but they lost my support when they finished their bottle of vodka and started to sing.

Kraków was fairly lovely: buildings, castles, cathedrals and such-like.  I quite liked it.  I went on a trip down the Wieliczka Salt Mine which was fascinating.  We trailed along three kilometres and down 130 metres, but only covered about 1% of the whole.  The bored salt miners spent a total of about 700 years digging away down there, and carved all sorts of weird stuff including three chapels and a rather accurate Salt Pope.

I also went to Oświęcim, which is a bit better known by its jaunty German name. Aucschwitz.