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Archive for September, 2008

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Administrative changes

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

By now it was Thursday morning and still our one administration requirement lay uncompleted.  The border crossing into Russia had occurred entirely without incident or hinderance, getting out in the same fashion required registration of our visas within 24 hours of entering the country.  This was one of those official tasks where there is very little actual literature to give proper guidance and so the number of interpretations about what is actually required seem to equal the number of people you talk to about it with the only one who really matters being thousands of miles away in their little border post.  The application process for the visa itself was similar where a requirement would seemingly be easily able to be checked off the list only for something to come out of nowhere to hold the whole process up.  A prime example of this was the Russian embassy in New Zealand being the one that insists on a cover letter from a travel agent which would seem trivial except that we had not been using an agent at all (because they are generally useless) but on enquiry were happy to send a letter off on our behalf as long as we booked some accommodation with them.  The conversation went something like this, [read on]

Police raid nightclub, detain dozens, no reasons given.

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

Welcome to Russia and awesome newspaper headlines. The title of this entry was just below the fold on the free English paper that you find around town. Others beauties include Police Bust Estonian Vodka Pipeline Gang, an article I initially ignored thinking it was merely a euphemism for some smuggling ring blah blah boring; but no it was an actual 2km pipeline from some illegal stills in Russia across the border to Estonia where, as a result of joining the EU, vodka prices have skyrocketed making the product a prime target for mafia types. The best part is that it’s not the first one they’ve found, quite how you secretly lay a 2km pipeline across a border I’m not sure. The main headline was Condeleeza Rice embarrassing herself calling Russia irrelevant, you’d think with all those Russian experts they still have knocking around over there they’d be able to come up with some accurate analysis. [read on]

Cultural grind

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
All I can recall of Tuesday through to mid afternoon is lying of my top bunk wishing the world would stop trying to force its way into my head in quite so insistent a manner.  With a pressing list of ... [Continue reading this entry]

Fine(d) in St Petersburg

Monday, September 15th, 2008
Less than an hour in Russia proper and I have already been fined by a very severe looking railway official.  The crime was taking a photo of an, on reflection kind of average, wall mosaic of Lenin.  The site Finland ... [Continue reading this entry]

Come have a sow-na

Sunday, September 14th, 2008
This is a lesson in how to forget a city.  With Russia dominating the planning and preparation, the regionalism of the Baltic being the first stop, the only thought that had gone into Helsinki was that there is a ferry ... [Continue reading this entry]