hey, vilnius rocks too!

i survived midsummer's festival in riga, it was actually a lot of fun! during the day i went to sigulda, called "the switzerland of latvia"...i don't really know why,...i mean it has some wooden houses, castles and lots of forests and some caves, but it really does not look like switzerland to me...oh well. the rainy day got a toll on me, but the midsummer's night (lingo) was fun at the lido with my host L...they had typical latvian food and music and i danced...yes, it was fun!
i then embarked on the bus to vilnius with zero sleep, and i arrived here in vilnius, lithuania. the southermost of the 3 baltic countries, the one with the least russians, the "more latin" one, if one can say so...
my host I is just super so everything is fun...i got to eat some typical (veggie) food, way too much food actually...and then we walked around vilnius, met up with a bunch of friends of hers, and had a fun night at broadway pub (well, broadway is spelled/written in lithuanian,...an indo-european language with 7 cases!). so it's fun here, i am loving it, enjoying my last week on the road, although there's a little too many italians here...going after the girls of course...what's new...the girls here don't seem to mind the foreigners because a) there's so many of them, and b) because the lithuanian boys are nowhere to be seen...my host says the good ones are already taken by now! haha
the town is somewhat deserted because of the long weekend, although there's still enough people to make it fun...riga was deserted too, looked like a city in the middle of a war (not that i've ever seen one, but that's what i picture it to look like...)
so today it's chilling and some football, tomorrow it's siauliai for the famous hill of crosses, and then tuesday i am going to see the trakai castle just outside vilnius...and then tuesday night i am on the bus to gdansk, in the north of poland...oh, and tomorrow it's also italy-australia...hopefully the socceroos and hiddink won't play tricks on us...

enjoying the baltic

still here in riga with 5 minutes to go online, visited the city properly today, including the view from a tall church, then took a train to jurmala with my cool hosts, caught italy on tv (yay!!!), then had a taste of baltic again in jurmala, which is full of russians, kind of expensive, they say it was the coolest resort for russians during soviet times and stuff...in the morning i also saw the latvian president, a woman, give a speech in the square,...i heard gwb likes her...hhmm what should i think??? tomorrow it's sigulda, the switzerland of latvia, with mountains and castles, and then at night sometime i am going to make it to vilnius, lithuania...

riga, latvia.

today i got to riga, in latvia. latvia is the one country in the middle, between the other 3 baltic republics...it's the one i have trouble thinking of because in italian it's "lettonia", very similar to lithuania, and there's no V...so anyway, riga is very pretty, not as cosy as tallinn but with wonderful roofs, churches and streets...there's still some russians, maybe even more than in estonia, and the language is one out of two indo-european languages in the baltic, it might be at risk of extinction, i am not sure...but it does sound strange, not similar to russian or anything...tonight i went to somebody from CS's graduation and it was fun, 7 girls and me at "Ai Karamba!"...all CS members except one, whom will soon join us! haha what a surprise...tomorrow it's big soccer/football game, italy-czech republic, and i might be going to jurmala, the #1 seaside resort in the baltic, with my supercool hosts A and L...fun will be had!

/pair-nu/

that is what Pärnu sounds like, although i didn't know myself...this is where i am right now, on the estonian coast, very nice place, relaxed, practically no foreigners, everybody is nice and it seems like a rich and progressive place...the beach is not too bad, many beautiful girls, sports, waterparks, etc etc...they say the water is fairly warm, i am going to try it out now...and then tomorrow it's off to riga, in latvia...new country, new baltic capital...new currency too...

tallinn rocks.

so i finally got my act together and left st petersburg and russia, although i had grown to ignore the not-so-nice answers and behaviors and i was enjoying my last few days there...i got out of russia without a problemfor not having a visa registration luckily, and i am now in estonia, the top of the baltic countries for those who don't know...
estonia feels like finland, except not as cold, with much cheaper prices, prettier girls and friendlier people!!! :) yes, doesn't that sound like fun?
coming from russia everybody is so polite, open and friendly, yet peaceful and civilised i just can't believe it! ok i am making the russians sound a little too bad here...but this is really great...there's still 1/3 of the population who's russian here, although estonians do have a history of not liking them...and you do hear russian on the street, it's almost too common and it really confuses me, but everybody else speaks estonian and...surprise, surprise...english! hehe yeah everybody seems to speak english here...estonian sounds very much like finnish to me, very similar sounds...it is a ugro-finnish language after all, while lithuanian and latvian are indo-european...but i don't know what those sound like yet, so i can't tell!
it does feel very much like europe, or the EU, here...english is spoken, the country seems quite modern, it is very e-savy...very enjoyable! it is so e-savy that it's hard to find an internet cafe because there's free wi-fi at most places in the center!
oh i forgot...tallinn's old town is just wonderful, made of narrow, cobblestone streets and pretty pointy and colorful buildings...i had no idea!
the supermarket trip was also pretty awesome! they have so much yummy food, it's all fairly decent-priced and they have some interesting bread-like stuff that reminds me of either pizza dough or middle eastern bred...some are plain, some are with walnuts...and it's yummy...plus they have a wide range of smoked cheeses and cheeses with stuff (spices of some sort) on the crust...something like spiced cheese maybe, i have no idea...but it tastes really good!
what else...oh, yeah, there's also several groups of tourists, many brits on alcoholic weekends and also several italians and russians in big groups...the locals don't seem to mind (yet) and are very young, pretty and friendly! last night i ended up watching czech rep-ghana with my wonderful host T and her friends M and K, and then i joined the 3 funny romans i met in st petersburg for italy-usa...very bad game, what can i say?!

still here...

today i went to petrodvorets, amazing fountains, more grassy areas, as if yesterday wasn't enough! i am trying to get a bus to tallinn and not get fined for my lack of visa registration...other than that not much, tonight i will hopefully get to see the st petersburg bridges raise at night...it's quite the sight, or so they say...i better go now, my time is out and the world cup is coming up!

it's not super pretty but i don't want to leave!

i am still here in st petersburg, and i kind of like it here, it's somewhat relaxing, in a russian way i guess, and pleasant to walk around at anytime of the day and night, also thanks to the long days...i am here at cafe max, my favorite place: it has internet and a megascreen with the world cup, what else could i ask for?
so i am probably headed to tallinn, estonia, tomorrow night or the following day...today i went to see some parks, way too much green...i also caught some russian squirrels, although they didn't seem to have an attitude like the people! haha bad joke, ok
and tomorrow it's petrodvorets, some versailles-like park with insane fountains supposedly...we'll see...well i better go now, my time is out!

saint petersburg.

i am in saint petersburg now, i arrived last night, or early this morning, from moscow...so where did i leave this? probably in nizhny novgorod, with A and her cool adventure travel friends...on my last day there i got to take a boat on the volga to a village just across on the other bank, then ate more croissants and met up with A and S for a very trendy russian thing: sushi! we had sushi and then played bowling, it was fun! then i ran to the train station and spent yet another night on the train...to kazan this time. i got there super early in the morning, luckily my host A was there...i am so lucky! i managed to take a nap at her apartment before heading into town, accompanied by her...yes, she was my tour guide for my entire stay, how nice!!! so i visited 3-4 mosques there, also got a little book from an eminent person in one of the mosques, there's even a picture of him and khatami in the book he gave me! kazan is very modern thanks to all the new buildings that were built in 2005 to commemorate 1000 years of independence from russia...yes, because that is tatarstam, different language and they also have their own flag, which sadly reminds me of Berlusconi's Forza Italia (political party)'s one...i also tried some of the regional specialties as far as food, more fried stuff for me! the caucasian people at the market were calling me by the names of the national team football players, they (the caucasians) seemed friendlier than most russians i've met on this trip...hehe so yeah why are all the whites called caucasians when we have to fill out forms and stuff? apparently it's the fault of this german doctor who went to the caucasus region and found the men there to be in perfect health and to represent the standards that he was looking for...but it's ironic because they are not white! oh well...
after kazan i spent one day in moscow, wonderful T showed me around, victory park was really nice, and st basil's is always the shit...then my mood got buried underground when we got stopped and checked by police and since i don't have a visa registration i was fined...thanks to her "we could" bribe him to not write a report and pay HIM 1000 rubles (35-40$) instead of the official ticket, which is 3000rub...so you can imagine how happy i was!!!
now i better go because the time at the cafe is over, i found this computer on, somebody forgot their credit on this machine, can't complain! they also have a megascreen with the world cup on, so i switch between internet and football, how wonderful!!!
i arrived here in st petersburg and my host T is awesome, she came to get me at 4.35!!! we had chai at her house, and then i took a super long nap...then i started walking around on my own...st petersburg (SP) is really nice and very scandinavian-looking-like, less impressive than the center of moscow but it seems more relaxed...although most russians i ask things to really do not give a shit...it's been a constant on this trip, i have to admit it...i don't know why, but that's how things are...not only could they care less that they do not speak a word of english, but they seem like they couldn't care less about anything but their lives...oh well, who can blame them i guess? sadly that's been my experience with russians on the street...
ok i better go for real now, onto mexico-iran, or at least a little bit (1st half for sure) because then i am headed to T's house and hopefully i will get to cook something...i am starving!!!

куда я хочу, туда и еду. (я гуляю как кот)

ok let's see if i can pick up from where i left it...kiev, ukraine...why you guys call it "THE ukraine" is beyond my understanding, but whatever...ukraine was fun and i was once more sad to leave kiev, where i had a good time although at the beginning the super-crowded apartment and the 2 cats kinda had me worried...oh and the sleeping on the floor...the cold shower was just a detail at this point...my hosts Y and A were really busy all the time, yet they managed to host me in the best way...i even got to go to this czech-ukrainian night at the national opera house with all these diplomats and stuff because Y works at the czech embassy as a translator...well, i ended up sitting right in front of this man and son from olomouc (cz) that i had shared my sleeping wagon with on the bratislava-lviv train! how funny!
kiev was nice, the churches and big monastery+caves really cool, although i hit my head really hard there (or was it at the internet cafe?) and i bought myself a ticket for a tour of the caves in russian, which i didn't understans anything of, when the caves were free...oh well, independence square was the best, the atmosphere there great, plus on my way to the train station i saw an amazing sunset on the dnepr (river) from the metro...
but then the train ride kiev-moscow cheered me up...from the train attendant lady smiling at me when asking me if i was from italy and trying to ask me all these questions on the train, to the fact that our "open bunk compartment" was almost empty, except for me and pascha, this cool kid who's a PR designer for a fashion company in kiev which opens up monobrand shops for several italian fashion designers...so it was cool to talk to him, and it was so much fun because he'd been studying italian for 2 months, so he was trying to use his italian and i was trying to use my russian...great times!
i have to add that almost nobody in russia or ukraine speaks english it seems, the chances are higher with younger people in general, but still very hard...plus nothing in ukraine or russia (except moscow or st petersburg) seems to be catered to tourists, because there doesn't seem to be many that are not from CIS countries, so it's frustrating at times...it's hard to read, hard to understand and people don't even make an effort to communicate it seems...they just give up when they see you don't get their answer...but oh well...plus ukrainian is kind of like russian yet different, which makes everything more complicated i think...anyway...
so then we get woken up by the immigration police for russia at 4am and i am afraid of what can happen but everything goes smoothly...and i get to moscow, the biggest city in europe, the 2nd in the world for millionaire residents (after nyc) according to forbes...
what struck me the most about the center is the evident wealth, the showing off of money and luxury and status, i can tell these are the nouveaux riches, that they recently became rich...so you can see plenty of super-fancy cars with drivers and bodyguards, H2's with the $ symbol on the rims, and tacky stuff like that...it's all about showing off that you own things and brands...it's funny because at the same time this kinda thing is aimed more at foreigners (fancy restaurants have menus in english, etc...) but at the same time even though everything is in english (the brands, the slogans, the ads,...) nobody seems to speak english here...i remember a stupid example at the nokia store, central moscow, with insane cell phones, 2 brits walk in and ask for any staff that was english-speaking...answer: there isn't any! haha
but moscow is itself is full of history, the kremlin and the red square saw everything that we learn about in history books...the red square particularly blew me away, i would be amazed every time i would see st basil's, the one church that seems to come from aladdin or something...plus it's daylight till 10pm so it's even more fun! the young hip crowds wearing italian fashion designer brands gather and play hacky sack all day, the tourists go about their visits, and policemen are always on guard...moscow in many ways reminded me a lot of paris, and for many reasons and places i'd probably put it in my top 5, if not top 3, european capitals...
there couldn't have been a bigger difference with moscow so close to it anywhere else than in the golden ring, which i visited the next day...the golden ring is the modern name for a series of little villages outside moscow that used to be, in the XII-XIII centuries, the center of Rus, when Moscow was still pretty much nothing...before the Mongols came and changed everything...
so i visited vladimir and then suzdal, rushing through the day from metro to train to bus, to another bus to then catch another bus...well, it was more like a normal minivan with 15 people and their luggage packed inside for 5 hours till nizhny novgorod, where i arrived last night in a sand storm that welcomed me to the volga region...yes, we're by the volga here, the longest river in europe...it feels like a very small town compared to moscow, although it has 1.1 mln people, also thanks to the volga that surrounds the city...i am being hosted by A and her friends and colleagues, who are awesome adventure travelers and run www.teamgorky.ru so i am enjoying my time here...i will have to leave again tomorrow night to explore the republic of tatarstan...yes i will be going to kazan, where it's supposedly much more central asia-like and there's plenty of mosques, yet it's still russia (although they're somewhat autonomous)...
it's always sad to have to leave places just when you're getting to feeling "at home" there...at home as much as you could feel in a place you spend 2-3 days in i mean...but still, just when you start figuring things out it's time to leave, onto the next unknown and never-seen-before place that you have to figure out only to leave it a couple of days after...
but this is fun! i also heard about the mavericks making the nba finals and i am stoked for them of course, although i am in the wrong timezone to be able to catch any game at all...coincidentally, the same day (june 9th) is when the world cup starts...world cup of what?? what do you mean?? ahhh :)