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Articles Tagged ‘drinking’

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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]

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 Station where the great leader had arrived back to from his exile, gave a speech on a tank and proceeded on to do some stuff that you can read about elsewhere.  The punishment 100 roubles, a sixth of the money that we had just changed upon arrival.  The sequence of events was as simple as get off train from Helsinki, drag others outside to take photo of statue of Lenin on spot of aforementioned speech, change money, line up for subway tokens, pull out camera, get pulled by the scruff of the neck into a booth filled with unidentifiably uniformed officials, have piece of paper shoved under nose explaining offense and amount of fine, try and explain that personally I have no money on me a situation that’s not covered by my phrasebook, get shouted at, eventually wave over others who thankfully post my bail. [read on]

Beatboxing the Baltic

Friday, September 12th, 2008
Instantly on arriving in Tallinn it appears to be a far more thriving place than Riga.  Still the same pattern of old town, this time rather attractively on a hill as opposed to beside a river, surrounded by more recent ... [Continue reading this entry]