Estonia

"Look in the Kitchen", apparently.

We caught a public coach to Estonia, which meant six hours on a bus. Sweeeet times. I was sitting next to Adrian, who made the mistake of taking the window seat and not swapping when I offered, twice, and then wound up with the person in front of him lying on his lap for the last three or four hours. Poor Adrian. Neither of us is what you’d call small, so we were also sitting pretty much on top of each other the whole way. Not that I particularly minded.

That morning was the first time since we’d been in St Petersburg that it hadn’t rained. As soon as we sat down on the bus though, it started. There was a screen on the bus showing the temperature outside, and in ten minutes, it dropped ten degrees. The landscape is really flat and wide and open, and there were these enormous clouds above us. It absolutely poured and there was thunder and lightning right above us. The clouds were amazing, I could see up the side of them where they were about to meet, and they were incredibly thick.

We didn’t see the landscape between Moscow and St Petersburg because it was dark and we were theoretically sleeping, but between St Petersburg and Estonia it was just flat all the way. It’s very green and there’s lots of natural forest, unlike NZ where all the pine trees are in straight rows. Outside of the cities, it’s very untamed.

We had to cross the border from Russia to Estonia (of course) which was a bit of a palaver. When we exited Russia we had to all get off the bus, take all our luggage (hand luggage as well as packs), have it all x-rayed, and stand in line with the fifty other people off our coach to get our passports stamped. And they were not in any rush to do it. Then we loaded everything back on the bus, drove across the border to Estonia, and waited on the bus while they took all our passports away and checked them again. There was lot of time spent sitting on the bus going nowhere. The border crossing took well over an hour in the end.

It’s quite funny how the landscape changes at the border. Estonia was much more groomed looking. Lots more open spaces. It’s also not so run down as Russia, St Petersburg in particular was grimy and around the edges could’ve really used a lot of work on the buildings. Both countries have this amazing habit of leaving any building that they stop using to just rot. There are even buildings in the middle of cities with the roof caved in.

So we made it to Tallinn, the capital. There was group of eight of us that had already decided we wanted to get the ferry to Helsinki in Finland the next day (Helsinki makes me laugh every time I hear the word… any Little Britain fans will understand), so Tony took us on a city walk that night. We arrived at our hotel at about 730pm, so it was 8pm before we left to go for our walk. The old town is really beautiful, all the buildings are very prettily coloured and there are lots of winding cobblestoned streets.

Tallinn Town Square

We had a quick look at the outside of a couple of churches and took photos at the best look out spots, but then most of us suddenly decided we couldn’t wait any longer to eat. So we ate. I wound up at a medieval restaurant, having a medieval feast with Kat, Amanda and Steve, and Ian and Julie. IT WAS AMAZING. So much food. So much amazing food. I can’t even begin to describe it, I’ll just have to see if I can steal some of Amanda’s photos to put on here. I was too busy eating. The service was excellent as well, from everybody we came across in Estonia, but particularly the young guy who served us at this restaurant.

This is the photo the waiter took of Kat, Steve, Amanda, Julie, Ian and me.

Lucky Amanda and Steve are so lovely and emailed me some of their (better) photos.

Kat, Steve, Amanda, Julie, Ian, and me at Old Hansa Medieval Restaurant.

 

The Feast of a Lifetime.

Medieval brews - cinnamon beer... which was surprisingly good.

Previous three photos by Amanda and Steve Tilley 

We got home at something like 1130pm, and we decided to meet at 7am to get to the ferry terminal for Helsinki. I’ll write about that on a different blog.

Ian and Julie are amazing. Ian has worked in property development for well over twenty years, building apartment blocks and that sort of thing, and I think these days he travels something like six months of every year. He adores history and natural history, and he’s incredibly knowledgeable and interesting. He has a great way of explaining things, so that it’s really easy to follow and really interesting. Jess, you’d love him and Steve, they’re total WWII buffs. Steve served in the Australian army for over 20 years. Ian’s writing a thesis on something about the war that I can’t currently remember.

When we got to Latvia, Ian was going to be entering his 100th country. Julie’s not far behind him, this would be her 85th. Personally, it’d be my 27th, but I’m pretty good with that considering my age. They leave us in Poland, but Ian’s already been talking about the next trips he wants to do. And he wants to do at least one that I know of before Christmas.

We arrived back from Finland at about 730pm, so we thought we’d go for a wander round the old town and find something for dinner. We got a taxi to town, then found ourselves in the square, and we decided to go to a wine bar we’d spotted the previous evening for a glass of wine while we figured out what to do for dinner.

We left the wine bar around 1130pm. It was a good night. Good wine and very entertaining company. Amanda in particular is hilarious, and doesn't seem to have an off switch.

The Estonian people are really lovely. Tallinn’s become a real tourist centre, but they cope with it incredibly well. Everybody who served us at any restaurant or bar spoke excellent English and was friendly and smiled and gave lovely service for the entire time we were there. Even the poor girl at the wine bar, who the boys fancied. She was very pretty, in quite a Scandinavian way.

We should probably have gone home a little earlier that night, because the next day we had to leave the hotel at 9am to get to the bus for Latvia and I know there was at least one headache on board (not mine, Kat’s!!).

Happy 100th Ian!

This is the photo Tony took of me and Kat,

after I cropped the top half of the photo of and lightened the whole thing. 

He's a bit of a pro.

St Petersburg

The thing that I didn’t talk about in my Moscow blog was the people. The fashion in particular. It’s like they’re twenty years behind the western world, which to be fair they probably are, with good reason, but it was also very hit and miss. Some people looked great. Some looked terrible. Amanda and Steve were told by some friends before they got to Russia to look out for “Ruski's”, and to photograph them and put the best photo of the day on the net. Of course we all got involved in that. I personally have not posted any of them on the net… until now. One thing that really amazed us was that all the women wear high heels, everywhere. Even though there are lots of rough footpaths and roads and cobblestones. Crazy.  I particularly like the tights here:

The overnight train from Moscow was far better than I had expected (after overnight trains in Egypt where we didn’t have individual compartments and we were in upright seats hanging onto our bags all night). Pat was a bit shocked that nobody was coming to make the beds for us. The beds were relatively long and comfy but not ideal, I didn’t sleep much more than an hour or two, and Adrian didn’t really sleep at all.


We got to St Petersburg at 630am, but our hotel wouldn’t check us in until 2pm. So we went out for an orientation walk. We were all sooooo tired. I enjoyed St Petersburg, but I liked Moscow better somehow… St Petersburg is dirtier, a lot of buildings have dirt and soot on them. When we left Russia, I knew I could’ve spent another week in Moscow really happily, but I’d seen pretty much everything I wanted to in St Petersburg.

View from our hotel window.

Not the view from our hotel window.

After lunch that day, we had a guided tour at the Hermitage Museum, which is in the old Winter Palace, for two hours. I personally think it would’ve been better to have done the tour in the morning, or the next day, because we were all exhausted and out of patience. We had been warned that the guide wouldn’t wait if we were dawdling, because the museum is so huge and we had such a short time to see it in, but she was actually starting to talk when there were only one or two people there, out of the 15 of us. She was also talking really quietly, and with the number of other people and other tours in the place, we didn’t have a hope of hearing her unless we happened to be standing right on top of her. The first two people lost patience about ten minutes in and buggered off to wander around by themselves. I made it to 45 minutes, and by then I could see that Amanda (who has had a hip replacement) was very uncomfortable, so the two of us and Steve did a bit of a fade out and took our own little express tour through the palace, then went to the coffee shop. It was a real shame that the guide didn’t work out so well for us. The palace is stunning, every room is different, and it’s rammed full of art, but then again art and museums are not really my thing even on a good day.

Kat and me outside the Hermitage.

It was raining almost the whole time we were in St Petersburg. On the second day I decided I needed a sleep in, because we’d been on the go since we started the tour and after the overnight train I was totally wrecked. Most of the group went out to see the Peterhof fountains, and apparently Adrian got absolutely drenched in the rain, but I stayed in bed til 11am or so. Then I met Kat at the music museum, which was full of very helpful and very lovely Russian ladies who didn’t speak English. They tried very hard to tell us about everything in the museum. Lots of hand gestures. We wanted to pack them into our backpacks and take them on tour with us.


Then I went to see the woolly mammoth!!!!! It was the one thing I’d read about that I really, really wanted to do in St Petersburg. It was at the Zoological museum, which was much bigger than I’d expected somehow. It was pretty cool. It was about the only place in Russia that I saw any kids… which was the weirdest thing, there were just no kids anywhere. Not on the metros. Not in the streets. Not in the hotels. Apparently the population is declining in Russia, but there was a total, unexplainable absence of children pretty much anywhere.


The woolly mammoth was awesome!!!!!!!! He only has half a trunk and only a few patches of wool still left on his body. I think they dug him out of the ice in Siberia, I remember it being in the news at home when they found him. They had two or three babies as well, which had been found in different places. One of the babies was really fluffy and cute. I only had to push three or four kids out of the way to get my photos. Being 6ft tall has its advantages.

And the baby woolly mammoth!!!

Kat, Tony (the tour leader) and I had decided to go to the ballet in St Petersburg (again), and this time Tony organised the tickets and made sure it was Swan Lake we went to. The metro stops are quite far apart in St Petersburg, and we didn’t know where we were going, and so we had to wander round for ages finding the place. But we found it in the end. The ballet itself is beautiful, of course, but the dance company were not as good as the one we saw in Moscow. There were a few off-balance chorus ballerinas. We were sitting right down the front, by the orchestra, and Kat and I spent at least as much time watching the orchestra as the dancers. We spent a lot of time giggling. I even had one of the members of the orchestra trying to make me laugh towards the end of the ballet, when he had this really long sustained note to hold and he was running out of breath.


On our last day, we were leaving from the hotel to catch our bus to Estonia at midday, so by the time we rolled out of bed and wandered down to breakfast and took long showers and repacked our bags we didn’t have a lot of time to go and do much. But we were taking photos out of the window of our room, and there was a beautiful church a block away, which we hadn’t seen from street level. So we walked over there. Then we had pancakes with chocolate from a street vendor. Yummmmm.


And then to the bus and Estonia!!

McDonalds in Cyrillic.  Important stuff.  Phonetically it reads the same as in English.

More Moscow Madness

It's pronounced "stop"!!

I ended up loving Moscow, after being so nervous of the place on the first day.  We went to the Cathedral of the Assumption and attendant bridge...

...back to Red Square, and to visit Lenin's mausoleum.  He's very "waxy", you might say.  It's worth seeing him so you can form your own opinion.  Jason and I got in trouble for talking as we were going in, and we'd already been warned about smiling. 

Russia is crazy.  There are security officers and police absolutely everywhere.  And those are just the ones you see, we're pretty convinced there would be plainclothes all over the show as well.  It's particularly noticeable on the metro, but you see them all through the streets as well.

The metro is so fantastic.  I'd heard about it before I arrived and been really keen to see it.  It's absolutely stunningly beautiful.  There are 180 stops and I'm pretty convinced they're all different.  There's marble everywhere, and statues or frescoes or paintings or anything else you can conceive of decorating each stop.  You're not allowed photos of train drivers, officials, or the escalators, which is a shame.  We did a tour through the metro, which I loved....

Julie rubbing the bronze dog's nose for luck for the day!

   



The same guide, Helen, had taken us that morning for a tour of the Kremlin.  I'd pictured it being an enclosed palace, but it's actually a mini city inside a fortress wall.  There are heaps of churches, a big bell, and my favourite building was the one that they used as a residence.

Katherine by the bit that broke off the biggest bell in the world. 

"Imagine the bong that that would make".  I wish I could remember who it was that said that.

On the second night we were there, I went to the ballet with Kat and Adrian, the one single guy on our tour.  We had a great time trying to communicate with the Russian lady in the ticket booth, but we got tickets to something by Tchaikovsky, which we kind of ended up assuming was Swan Lake.  It wasn't.  It got to the interval and we all looked at each other, and Kat said "shouldn't she be a swan by now?"  In the second act there were a lot of toys dancing around, and she and I started to recognise the music.  The one piece we could name was Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, which helped us come to the realisation that it must've been The Nutcracker.

Don't look at me like that.  Everything's in Cyrrilic.

This is Adrian.  He's very tall.  Standing next to him is Steve, of Steve and Amanda fame.  It's entirely possible that they don't know I took this photo.

After the ballet, the three of us had crapdogs for dinner.  Crapdogs became a bit of a running joke amongst the entire tour group, which may or may not have been started by me.  Check this out:

Adrian and I waited for Katherine to eat hers before we bought ours.

Then we went and met Steve and Amanda for a drink.  This is Amanda:

I love this photo.  She had just been to the toilet.  However, the puddle of water is from her washing her hands with water from her drink bottle.

The following night the five of us went out for dinner, to the Pushkin Cafe, which is meant to be one of the best restaurants in Moscow.  It was rather expensive, and they told us there was a dress code - no jeans for the boys and no bare shoulders for the girls.  We were all worried that we wouldn't get in, because it's not like the boys brought suits with them, and what we do have that's nice is not necessarily going to cover our shoulders completely.  However, we managed.  The boys wore dark jeans and nice shirts.  Everybody scrubbed up pretty well!  And the meal and the service were really excellent.  It was a very fun night.  We'd invited Tony as well, the tour leader, but he didn't come in the end.

Me, Amanda, Steve, Adrian and Kat at Pushkin Cafe; my meal; Kat and me still at Pushkin.

Previous three photos by Amanda and Steve Tilley

The last day we had in Moscow was a free day.  I went out by myself, to the Gulag Museum (which was fantastic, I was there for hours), then to a street exhibition of photographs by Pattie Boyd which I stumbled across (she was married to George Harrison and then Eric Clapton), and then to a sculpture garden, which was originally a dumping ground for old Soviet sculpture but has since had bits added and has turned into quite a lot of sculpture in quite a big area.  I had a great day.

We had to get the metro from our hotel to the train station, and then we had an overnight train to St Petersburg.  After having beautiful weather for the entire time we'd been in Moscow, it absolutely bloody POURED as soon as we decided to leave the hotel.  By the time we got to the train, the water was running out of my hair and right down my shoulders and into my clothes.  The train was better than expected, but the beds were still too short for me and Adrian, so by the time we got to St Petersburg at 630am and to the hotel at 730am we were pretty damn tired.  And this time we couldn't get into our rooms!!

Watch this space for St Petersburg info and photos...

D-Day Minus 18

I feel like it's been a while since I wrote anything so I thought I'd better get onto it.  What better way to spend my Saturday night?!  It's been a pretty up and down week, and every time I came to write this I found myself in a bad mood.  But now, I'm in a good mood and I have time to spare!

Since last time I wrote - my Canadian visa came through!  Very pleased.  I was really relaxed about it anyway, I had never heard of anyone having a problem getting one for Canada.  But I'm glad it came through before I left NZ.  Another weight off my mind.  Now I'm relatively confident I don't need to worry about any more visas.  (I am going to check all the other countries one more time though, you never can be too sure.)

I also managed to finally get my car to the wrecker, thanks to Hugh, the guy who's taking over my job.  When I had a proper look at the map to see where this particular wrecker was, it turned out to be right at the side of the motorway, and there was no way I could've walked back into town - close as it was.  I was trying to think of any friend I might have who had a car and time to drive out there with me during the working week, and Hugh turned around and offered, which was incredibly nice of him.  So we drove out there on Wednesday afternoon.  As soon as they'd weighed it, while I was still standing there, they literally drove it into a pile of metal.  Which they then had to climb over to tear the licence plates off it, so I can get it deregistered.  (Daaaaad....  might need your help there, since it's in your name!  I have the form at home already.)  So I got $178 for it.  Which, to be fair, is more than I would've got selling it to anyone else.

Hey, if anyone wants to buy a queen sized bed, a fan heater, or a stereo, or if anyone wants free clothes, blankets, shoes, electric blanket, or digital alarm clock, I'm your man!  Still got a lot of stuff to get rid of and I'm not having any luck with trademe.  My bed in particular is really good and quite new, and it'd be such a shame to have to take it to the Sallies and get nothing back for it.  I'm going to put a sign up at work as well, and offer it all to my existing and new flatmates.

I've also had the first of the Leaving Do's this week...  Thank you so much to Karl for taking me, Hugh, Jay (our newly appointed Training Manager) and Graeme (the awesome guy who oversees the factory side of things) out on Wednesday night.  It was a great night.  Far too much alcohol consumed by all of us, an excellent meal at Monsoon Poon, 10 or 15min spent winding up the staff who were working at our shop that evening, and then they all took turns to beat me at pool.  Next up, staff drinks on Thursday night, and dinner and (MORE) drinks with my friends on Friday.  There will be texts and facebook invites to everyone in Wellington who doesn't already know the plan or hasn't already been invited.  It was going to be Saturday with my friends, but apparently there's some rugby game that some people want to go to....  You know who you are....!  I actually have to be at work in the shop at 8am on Friday (or I chose to, whatever) so by Saturday I'm going to be totally exhausted.

Family - if you can, it would be great to see you either in Rotorua (3 - 7 Aug) or in Auckland (7 - 10 Aug) before I go.

Aside from having trouble getting shot of the rest of my stuff, I'm finally feeling like I've got everything under control and I'm ready to go.  I'm much calmer, and I seem to have got past that feeling of still having a lot to do.  Most of the time.  I did have a pretty bad case of the butterflies yesterday, for no apparent reason.  And I'm just not thinking about flying into Russia because that really does scare the shit out of me.  I'm telling myself that it's good to scare the shit out of myself occasionally.  Feel the fear and do it anyway, right?

No, I'm Not Excited, I'm Nervous

Everyone keeps asking me how I'm feeling, now that it's all getting really close, but only one person has hit on how I do feel.  Stew, my stepdad, asked me if I was nervous.  YES, I'm nervous.  So many people have asked if I'm excited, but I'm actually not.  There's so much else to tidy up before I can even think about getting excited, and things like leaving my job are strangely stressful.  You kind of imagine that finishing up in a job will be a really nice feeling and that everything's going to be easy and rosy and everyone's going to be hugging you and crying, but that's certainly not the way it's going for me.  Hugh and I are both working really long hours - him more so than me, to be fair - and because we're doing everything together at the moment and I'm getting him to figure things out for himself, it all (quite naturally) takes a bit longer.  He is doing a good job though, he has a very naturally fair and honest and nice way with people, and he'll be absolutely fine without me.  Also, I think most people at work have kind of forgotten that I'm going, or not realised just how soon it is or SOMETHING because there sure don't seem to be many people who are particularly bothered!  It's only just over two weeks until I finish at work now, it feels very soon.

So I went back to the Russian Embassy on Monday morning.  It was howling a freaking gale up in the hills in Karori, and I just about got blown away with the door, trying to get it shut behind me.  There were a group of people already there, and this little old lady started talking to me in Russian.  I kind of smiled and shrugged, as you do when you don't know that you share any language with someone, and so she carried on talking to me in Russian.  I was feeling pretty awkward by this stage cos she was obviously going to expect a slightly more verbal response at some stage, but luckily one of the other people there cut in and said something to her in Russian, and she turned around and said something else to me in Russian, which I HAD STUDIED ENOUGH to understand!!!!!!!!  She was asking if I was not Russian.  So I said "no" in Russian, which I also remembered, and she asked again, more disbelievingly, and I said no again, and she asked again, and I said no again, and then she asked something else and everyone in the room just about died laughing, except me cos I didn't understand that bit.  Then her friend told me she'd asked why I wasn't Russian.  Which kind of set the tone for the next hour and a half.  The old Russian lady was hilarious, and the people she was with all spoke really good English and so they'd all translate for me.  She was talking about things like going to get her passport photos done in Australia cos it's too expensive in New Zealand.  Anyway, long story short, I spent an hour and a half sitting around at the Russian Embassy, talking to the other people who were waiting, to find out that my visa is perfectly fine.  At the very bottom of it, like on your passport photo page, they have lots of arrows and letters and numbers.  What I thought was probably meant to be my name read "JEQMS LAURA MARJORI".  But they assure me that so long as everything else on the visa is right, then it won't be a problem.

I went to the doctor too.  There's nothing wrong with my eyesight, and he suggested that next time I get my license renewed I go to a different place to do it.  He was surprised that they checked my eyesight in the first place because he didn't think they did that until you were a senior citizen.

Haven't managed to get the car wrecked yet though.  I went to the place in the central city, and they only take cars at their outlet in Ngauranga Gorge.  I can probably walk to my house from there, in well under 45 minutes, so it's nowhere near as far out of town as any of the other scrap metal yards.  This is important for two reasons:  1. Last time I tried to drive to Petone (10min up the motorway) my car overheated before I got there and I had to sit on the side of the road for an hour waiting for it to cool down.  2. I don't have to try to find an alternative means of transport back into town once I have Done The Deed.  And, bonus, they seem to buy cars for a pretty good price - $220 per tonne, and the guy I was talking to guessed my car would be about 700kg.  Most of the places I looked at pay $100 for any car.

By the way, I promise that when I get overseas I will start putting photos on this page, instead of just massively long stream-of-consciousness posts!

Definitely the Right Decision

The more that happens around here, the more I'm sure I'm doing the right thing by moving on.  The number of pretty decent earthquakes that have happened in or very near to NZ is getting pretty spooky, and I'm currently living right on top of The Major Fault Line in Wellington (it literally runs right down our street) in a 100+ year old house.  I guess, since the house is that old, it's probably stood up to quite a lot.  But I don't really want to experience first hand how it handles a big earthquake.  That 6.5 on Tuesday that was centred just out of Taupo (so, like, 350km away) was enough of a rattle for me.  Our house was swaying, and I was upstairs.

Had a few more of those Achieving Things days this week.  Quite proud.  I finished sorting out my new credit card application (I already have a MasterCard but it was rather difficult to use in places like Jordan, so I am applying for a Visa); called MasterCard to get my card updated before I go, and to let them know I'm going to travel so they don't cut me off while I'm away; went to get my driver's licence updated and an international drivers licence, and discovered I need an eye exam because when they got me to do their eye test all the letters were crossing over and I couldn't read any of them; called the doctor and made an appointment to get that done; found a car wrecker in the central city that I can take my car to, instead of having to traipse out to the Hutt; finished my resignation letters to Karl and Christine and handed them out; and I booked flights from Athens to Vancouver...  with 3 days in New York City on the way!!!!  So excited!  I LOVE New York, as most people who've met me will know.  Oh yes, and I found what could potentially be a problem with my Russian visa, so it's back to the Embassy for me tomorrow morning.  Damn it!  At least the Embassy is reasonably close to wear I live (hahaha, "wear"!!  Didn't see that til I proofread...  I mean "where") (well, the Embassy's on the same side of town as my house, but it's not exactly a light stroll away).  It's likely that it's going to cost me money to get it fixed, since I didn't spot it when they asked me to check it over when I picked it up.

Now that I've told a whole lot of people that I'm going to live in Vancouver, I'm totally reconsidering.  It's still going to be Canada, don't misunderstand me, but who knows, Canada's a big place and maybe I'll go somewhere else.  I'll wait and see how I feel when I get there.  I was thinking Vancouver because I've been there before and I know I like the place, and it's easy to get home, and it's a big city so it's likely I'll be able to get reasonably cheap flights around the country when I want to, and I shouldn't have any problem meeting people.  But then I thought, there are other big cities in Canada.  There's Toronto.  There's Victoria, on Vancouver Island.  There's Winnipeg, if I really wanted to get cold over the winter.  And the other thing is, I don't have to stay in one place the whole time I'm there.  I could go and live in the north for a while, and see the whales and the icebergs and the polar bears.  My gut feeling is that since I'm going to be by myself, I'm going to want to base myself somewhere reasonably permanently, and then do weekend trips from there.  Unless I happen to find someone who wants to move around with me.  Who knows, it's a whole new world of opportunity (cheese!).

Today's the 10th of July...  Right on a month until I fly out.  Sorry Mum!!!  I couldn't not mention it, it's on my mind every day.  I still feel like I've got a lot to do, but I think it's more that I'm stressed out.  I've written list after list of what I need to accomplish, down to things like drop stuff off to the Sallies.  I've even written it all into a week by week timeline, so that I can plan out when I do things like start trying to sell my bed...  AND I ticked off everything I had on the list for last week, which was the busiest week.  Whenever I get something done I feel really relieved, but then a day or so later I'll be back to thinking "oh my god I've got so much to do before I go".  I am eating a LOT of chocolate lately!

CHARLEY TIME!

Less than a month until I finish at work.  And only 39 days until I fly out.  This shit just got real.

I got my Russian visa!  Woohooooo!!!  I picked it up on Thursday morning, and it was a much less intimidating experience than when I dropped it off.  Now I can stop worrying that I'm going to have to change my entire itinerary and all my flights because of that visa, and start worrying about the ash cloud.  What a relief! 

I thought about posting a photo of my brand new Russian Tourist Visa in my brand new passport, but I wasn't sure that either country would've been too happy about that.  So you'll just have to believe me that it's bright and shiny and red and mostly indecipherable.  Must start learning some Russian.  At least enough to get me through the airport on the small chance that they don't have at least a few staff who speak English.

Hugh is doing well, learning the ropes to take over from me when I leave.   He now has roster writing down to about a 5 hour mission, including the two of us looking at it together for an hour and a half.  I remember those days...  such frustration! 

So much still to do before I go overseas.  Every time I cross one thing off the list, I add something else to it!  I had a really big think and chose one of my staff who I know loves me to bits (she's the only one I've kept in touch with since she's left Kaffee Eis), and who's now studying management at Waikato, and asked her to write me a reference.  That was another one of those learning curves, figuring out how to explain to her how to write a reference without telling her what to say!  I know you usually get references from your superiors, and I'll do that as well, but if I was hiring a manager I'd be just as interested to know the thoughts of the staff who had reported to that person in the past.  And I've written my formal resignation letter to Karl, which is currently a page and a half long.  Might edit that a little before I give it to him!  When I thought back over the almost six years I've worked for him, I suddenly had plenty to say.  And I've drafted one for Christine, but I haven't got anywhere near finishing it yet.  I also got all the forms filled in to get my driver's licence renewed (it's due to expire in April of next year and I have to be in the country to do it); started the process to get a Visa card and now just have to collect ten tonne of paperwork to prove that I do currently earn money and have some idea of how to manage it; signed the letter from MasterCard offering me an extention on the limit on that card but am still deciding whether to return it; booked a flight to Greece from Istanbul to meet Charley for a week at the end of my tour!! (Charley is from the UK and came to NZ for six months on a work exchangey thing over summer, and rowed with my crew for the time she was here); photographed my stereo with the intention of listing it on TradeMe to sell it; and went to the travel agent to book accommodation in Hong Kong and a flight from Greece to Canada - but she wasn't in so I'll have to go back.

For those who don't know, my plans (dates are very vague at this stage) -

29 July - Finish at Kaffee Eis
30 July - Some kind of leaving do (will make details known when I figure out what I want to do!)
3 Aug - Goodbye Wellington   :-(
10 Aug - Goodbye NZ!!  Hello Hong Kong!
13 Aug - Midnight Flight Delight from Hong Kong to Moscow...  And TOUR DAY!!  You can see my tour itinerary on the company's website:  http://www.tucantravel.com/tour/overview/eastern-europe-discovery/eeed
8 Oct - My birthday!  Tour ends, fly to Greece, YAY CHARLEY TIME!
16 Oct - Fly to my new home in Caaaaanada.... 

I'm really excited!  And now I have to go and try to get to sleep.  I don't really see this working out for me.

Ruminations on Role Reassignment and Russian Visa Requests

Another 10 days closer to leaving.  It's starting to feel a little more real now.  Not a lot, but a little.

The staff meeting was definitely strange.  It all ended up being less dramatic than what I felt, of course, probably because for everyone else it's just the next order of business - although Karl did suddenly have more attention when he started talking about it!  For me it's more like the end of an era.  Karl announced it almost in one breath:  "As most of you will know by now the lovely Laura is leaving us, and the person who will be taking on her role is Hugh".  And then it was done.

So three or four days later, on Monday, Hugh was in the office with me, learning how to do the pay and the roster and how to find his way around the computer.  He's also been helping me to have individual meetings with all the staff, just to find out where they're all up to and to make sure they know how we feel about their work.  That's been a learning curve for everybody involved - me included.  Which is a good thing.  I've been supervising Hugh while helping him to run the meetings, and doing it without undermining him could be interesting if he happens to say something that I don't think is appropriate.  The staff need to see him as my equal right from now, so I don't want to correct him in front of them if I can avoid it.  I've also suddenly found myself working in the shops four or five days a week.  It's been a while since I worked in the shops, let alone had to be at work at 730am, so that was a bit of a shock to the system all round. 

When I received my insurance information on Saturday (thanks Dad!) I finally had everything I needed to apply for my Russian Tourist Visa.  They are tricky visas to obtain.  You have to show where you are going to be each day, where you're going to stay each night, and who's going to be hosting you while you're in the country, and you have to show that you have a confirmed medical insurance policy which is valid in Russia.  I paid the tour company to organise the pieces of paper I needed from inside Russia, because otherwise it would've meant chasing the Russian host tour company and hotels myself, which I was not keen on. 

Tuesday wound up being my day off, so having checked everything in the application pile umpteen times, I set off to the Russian Embassy.  I knew it was in Karori, and I had imagined some grandiose building with huge gates and scary looking guards, most likely with bullet- and stab-proof vests and machine guns, on a main street.  But when I Google mapped it, it was on a really suburban street.  I found my way there, and drove all the way up and all the way back down the road.  I saw a relatively grandiose building with big gates, so I naturally assumed that was it.  It was a retirement village.  I had by that stage parked and started walking, so I kept walking like that was what I planned all along.  I happened to see a totally non-descript place with a big white wall that had a small plaque on it, which turned out to be The Embassy of the Russian Confederation in New Zealand.  Not exactly what I was expecting.  The only security was a gate at street level that you had to be buzzed through.  I walked up the stairs and opened the door.  There was a swelteringly hot room with a window at the far end that looked through to the next room, a lot of signs in Russian on the walls, about six people sitting around, and one or two spare chairs.  Everybody in the room turned around and stared at me as I walked in.  I had no idea whether there was some kind of obscure queuing system going on, but one of the women behind the window immediately called me over.  Another woman was being served next to me at the window, and she was speaking rather loudly on her mobile in Russian.  The woman who was serving me was clearly Russian.  While she was looking over my application, the door opened and someone else came in.  They said something in Russian which everyone else in the room repeated (note to self:  Start Studying) and I finally worked out why everyone stared at me silently when I'd walked in.  I was the only person there who wasn't Russian.

The woman who was serving me spent a good few minutes reading over everything, comparing things on the various pieces of paper, and then reading things again while running her finger along underneath them.  Me being me, I was by that stage absolutely certain that I was going to be told I couldn't have a visa for some reason that they'd then refuse to tell me, and that I was going to have to rearrange all my flights and accommodation and tour dates.  But, total anticlimax, she just asked for payment, and said that everything looked fine and I should come back next Thursday to pick it up. 

So in the next 45 days, I only have to:  sell my car (which has now decided to grow a leak in the head gasket and render itself completely unsalvageable and unsaleable); sell my bed and stereo; decide what I'm going to keep and what I'm going to throw out, both at my flat and the pile of junk Dad's been storing for the past few years; pack a bag to travel with and maybe a box to have sent over to Canada when I get there; buy a flight from Athens to Vancouver and one out of Canada; organise accommodation in Hong Kong, Greece, and Vancouver; start learning Russian; and organise the written references I want.

Oh CRAP.

Two Months To Go!

Tomorrow is bang on two months before I fly out...  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.  "Excited" is not the right word.  "Strange" might be a bit closer.  I keep having these moments of feeling completely taken aback about the places I'm going to go and the things I'm going to do.  Two days ago it was "I'm going to Romania".  Yesterday it was "Moscow...".  Today it's "OH MY GOD IT'S ONLY TWO MONTHS UNTIL I FLY OUT!".  Although I am much calmer about the whole thing now than I was a week or so ago.

Today I spent the whole day running round Achieving Things (after I woke up at 11am, that is).  I took my backpack in to have the places where the stitching has pulled resewed.  I went to the Sheepskin Warehouse in Evans Bay, where I used to work, and spent over $100 on merino-possum blend socks and gloves.  I went to the bank, organised the bank cheque for my Canadian working holiday visa, and sent that application away.  I washed my car and took it to Turners to see what they thought they could do with it (sell it for $500 at minimum $300 commission.  Conclusion:  Not Worth It).  I asked at TSB Bank about a Visa, because they have the best charges and rates, but it turns out you have to have a bank account with them for 6 months before they'll approve you for a credit card, so that went out the window too.  AND I tidied my room.  That only leaves me with a list that's most of the length of my arm to complete before I leave!