The easiest way to get from Helsinki, Finland, to St. Petersburg, Russia, is by train.  It’s a straight shot, takes about three and a half hours.  Since St. Petersburg was our next destination, taking the train was everyone’s first suggestion.  We didn’t take the train.

We skipped a lot of Europe when we skipped from Bulgaria to Finland, and I wanted to see at least some part of it before we slipped into Russia.  Estonia, which was right across the Baltic Sea, was an easy choice.  Close, cheap, and also sharing a border with Russia.

We left Helsinki on a giant cruise ship (the word “ferry” just didn’t seem to apply) and a couple hours later, we were in Tallinn.  We spent a night and a day there, exploring the city, and loved every minute of it.

European Union

Estonia was our first border crossing within the European Union and we weren’t prepared for it.  We disembarked from the ship with a few hundred other passengers and followed them through the long and twisting corridors of the ferry terminal.  We passed through a couple glass doors and suddenly found ourselves standing next to a line of taxis.  Hey, what the heck?  Did we somehow miss immigration and customs?

Nope.  There was no immigration, no customs.  As we skipped back into the terminal to withdraw some more Euros from an ATM, I reflected on just how much more convenient life in the Union must be for the people of Europe.  Crossing from country to country didn’t seem to me to be much different than crossing from state to state in America.

Only bummer is we didn’t get any new stamps in our passports!
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We only really had one opportunity to eat at McDonald’s while we were in Helsinki and neither Oksana nor I were hungry at the time.  Unfortunately, I think that sort of shows in the video.  Hunger being the best spice and all that.

Anyway, we made a big deal about how incomprehensible the Finnish menu was for us, but we actually had a very helpful person taking our order.  He was an older gentleman with perfect English.  When I told him I’d have the 1955 burger, he nodded and said, “Good choice.  You’ll like that one, it’s very good!”  I’ve never had a McDonald’s cashier validate the deliciousness of my order before!

Just for fun, here’s the official Finland McDonald’s menu (at least for the Helsinki restaurant we visited.)  Can someone tell me what a Tuplajuustohampurilaisateria is?

When planning our round-the-world trip, there were a few places we knew we wouldn’t get a chance to visit.  China and India, because they were big and daunting enough to become full trips of their own.  The Middle East, because of the volatility of the region.  And Europe, because we knew we’d never be able to stay within our budget.

We managed to get a taste of Europe though, when we visited Finland.  Why, of all the countries we could have chosen, Finland?  Two reasons:  It’s the closest country to St. Petersburg, our point-of-entry into Russia, and one of Oksana’s college roommates, Kaisa (who came to Alaska as an international exchange student), lived in Helsinki.

Our flight from Bulgaria actually went south first, for a layover in Istanbul, so it was late afternoon by the time we arrived in Finland and we were tired from a long day of travel.  When we reached immigration, the officer behind the counter grilled us.  How long are you staying? Where are you going next? Where are your tickets out of the country? How much money do you have?   

We had answers for everything but the tickets; we told him that our plan was to buy bus or train tickets to Russia within the week.  He was skeptical when we told him we only had 43 Euros on us (which was how much we received after exchanging the remainder of our Bulgarian lev at the airport.)  He demanded to know how we would get more money within the country, so I started pulling credit and debit cards from my wallet and snapping them onto the counter.  He stopped me at four, stamped our passports, and waved us through.

Kasia was waiting for us beyond customs and, after hugs, she whisked us away from the airport and took us directly to her farmhouse in the countryside, 80kms north of Helsinki.  We spent most of the next five days on the farm, enjoying the peace and quiet, but we saw a bit of Helsinki, too, as we somehow managed to make the long trip into the city each and every day we were there.
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Imagine this:  Months ago, you found a great deal on an international airline ticket and you decided, on the spot, to change your travel plans in order to take advantage of it.  You bought the tickets, received itineraries via email, and promptly forgot all about them.  Then, on the day before your flight, you decided to hop online to see if you could do a web check-in, perhaps get early seat assignments.  That’s when you discovered that your flight had been rescheduled for the day before and had, in fact, departed two hours ago.

That’s what happened to Oksana and me in Moscow a couple weeks ago.

Let me back up, tell it from the beginning.

We were in Aswan, Egypt, at the end of July.  Our next couple of weeks were planned out, but we had a deadline on the horizon.  My Russian visa, which we’d obtained in Argentina, had set dates.  I could enter any time after July 1^st, but I had to leave the country by the end of September.  We wanted to spend at least a full month in Russia, so that meant we only had one month, August, to travel through the Middle East and Europe.

While searching around for flights online, Oksana stumbled on a remarkable deal: One-way, Moscow-to-Bangkok, SriLankan Airlines tickets for $339.40 each.  The date was perfect, September 28^th, but we were planning on entering Russia near Moscow and traveling to the Far East over the course of our month-long stay.  Oksana spent a few more hours crunching the numbers and discovered something interesting: Even accounting for one-way tickets back to Moscow from Kamchatka, we could still fly to Thailand for around half the price of booking tickets out of Vladivostok.   On the spot, we decided to cross the whole of Russia twice and booked our tickets through Orbitz.

Fast forward to September.  We entered Russia via Estonia and spent a week in St. Petersburg.  From there, we took the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Irkutsk, then flew to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy – Oksana’s hometown.  We spent a couple weeks there with her brother and actually changed our airline tickets so that we could get back to Moscow sooner and spend an extra day there.  Our Aeroflot flight left on the 27^th at 5:30pm and arrived in Moscow, nine hours later, at… 6:30pm.

We crashed early that night, with the strangest case of jetlag I’ve ever experienced.

The next evening, around 7:30pm on the 28^th, Oksana decided to get online and see about our seat assignments.  Our flight was scheduled to leave the following day, on the 29^th, at 5:40pm, but she couldn’t find the flight anywhere on the SriLankan Airlines web site.  Confused, she went back to her email and dug up the latest message from Orbitz.

At first blush, nothing looked awry.  The big, bolded sub-head still read “Moscow to Bangkok 9/29/11,” but further down, the itinerary actually began with “Wednesday, September 28, 2011.” That’s where she noticed that the flight had left right on time… just 24 hours before we expected it to!

A careful read of the rest of the email turned up this phrase in a teeny-tiny font size:

Hi! This is from orbitz. Please call orbitz because there has been a schedule change in your reservation. Thank you.

Click to enlarge

Oksana looked up from her computer. “Oh my God.  I think we just missed our flight!”

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Who would have thought Bulgaristan would have had one of the most interesting McDonald’s menus we’ve encountered so far?  Not me!

We only had two days in Sofia, the capital, so we made sure to hit McDonald’s for dinner the night we arrived.  We saw so many things on the menu we wanted to try that we went back again the next day.  Because this is a double-shot of food sampling, it’s a slightly longer-than-normal video.

Also, this is where we learn that Oksana has been lying to us!  After I turned off the camera, she made a face and said she really didn’t like the Zorba.

“What?!” I asked.  “Why  didn’t you say that on camera?”

“I don’t know…” she replied.

We ended up swapping burgers, so I didn’t even get to eat my McMenu Shrimp Lemon Burger!  I have to admit, too, that the Zorba does whatever the opposite of “grows on you” is.  By the end, I had to force myself to eat the last bite.  Oksana was right on one point: That cheese was really salty!

And don’t worry.  Oksana has since vowed to be more honest on camera.  Let’s hope she doesn’t start doing spit-takes!

This was our plan when we thought we had a lot of time:  Fly from Israel to Istanbul, then work or way north through Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine.  From there, we’d swing west to Poland (because Belarus has an expensive visa) and continue up through Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on the way to visit a friend in Finland.

By the time we left Turkey, however, our plans had changed.  Our new plan was to go north to Bulgaria… and then fly directly to Helsinki.

We still had some time, but we came to this decision for two reasons.  First, Oksana’s childhood friend, Karina, invited us to stay with her vacationing family in their Sveti Vlas condo on the Black Sea.  Second, the stay was offered rent-free and without a limit on duration!  It turned out to be a great opportunity for us to recoup some of the money we’d spent on our recent travels.

Staying with Karina in her one-bedroom condo was her grandmother and one-year-old daughter.  They generously gave us the bedroom and we quickly settled into a routine.  Babuska busied herself making three huge meals every day, Oksana and Karina spent every waking hour catching up and fussing over Liza, Karina’s daughter, and I spent most of my time in the bedroom (since I couldn’t keep up with the spoken Russian) making a lot of headway on my travel writing.

From time to time, we’d go for a walk with Liza in the stroller, pick up some groceries, go to the beach, or buy a beer at the pub across the street so we could use their wi-fi.  A week turned into 10 days.  10 days turned into two weeks.  We left Sveti Vlas on a bus, bound for the capital city of Sofia, where we spent just a couple of days before flying out.

Sveti Vlas was a total resort town, which was a great place to kick back and enjoy the warm weather, but it didn’t give us any idea about what the rest of Bulgaria was like.  Sofia was more interesting; both Oksana and I enjoyed it a lot.  It was in Sofia that Oksana first remarked, “You know what?  I think I could live here for a little while…”

Here are some of the things I found interesting about Bulgaria:
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Guess what?  We ate at McDonald’s in Turkey, too.

Not much to say about this one except that we used the trip to McDonald’s as an excuse to go a little farther from our hotel in Sultanahmet.  We rode the metro to the Kanyon Mall and planned to take in a movie, too, but the ticket prices were pretty high and nothing was starting soon, so we just did our McDonald’s thing instead.  The restaurant was so crowded (and obviously trendy) that we weren’t sure we’d even get a table at first.

And dang it!  This is the third week in a row I’ve posted a McDonald’s video with audio problems.  It’s a really good thing this sort of stuff doesn’t bother me.  This time, it wasn’t the fault of the video camera; what you’re hearing is what it picked up in a very noisy restaurant.  No, the fault lies in that little microphone you can see on the table with the red record light.  The red record light that lets us know it’s recording.  The red record light that has nothing to do with whether or not the recording will eventually be saved to the micro-SD card inside.  It’s only happened once or twice so far, but sometimes the mic (a Zoom H1) “crashes” (for lack of a better word.)  Oh, well.  At least I don’t have to type up subtitles this time.