New advetures from Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Russia

The man that was sitting behind us in the plane looked trough the window and said: “Sweden is exactly like Switzerland”, ad his wife replied: “Yes, but without the mountains”...

Can anybody imagine a more poetic description of the land of ABBA?

I had already met Estevao (also known as: Esteban, a.k.a: The King) in Barcelona, and just in the Arlanda airport we met Alice (aka: The Queen). Then we took a train and we got a little bit lost in the Central Station.

But we managed to find Riikkaa and Marika with their blue Aeggee t-shirts and their yellow Aegee banner quite faster than Michele (aka: Bottle Game Champion), who had been wandering around for hours and hours.

I tried to convince the girl in the information desk to call Michele with her micro and she did it, but before she tried to make me spell “Michele” (we will never know if she keeps a written list of the names she calls or if she wanted to test me just for fun).

We also met there Standa (aka: Best Beer Companion) and Michal (aka: The AEGEE Expert), and we started running after the fast-walking Finnish girls, direction to Karlavagen St.

We were too fast to pay attention to anything, but we couldn’t help noticing already the colorful Mad Cows (an exposition of painted bovines that was spread all around). Some of them were nice, some were ugly, most of them were kitsch, but they all were fun and give some childish charm to that nice Stockholm (aka: Venice of the North, aka: just Stan), a lovely and clean city with 14 islands and 53 bridges...

And the sun was shining as the shiny Gay Pride Day flags around.

In the queue to register in the Dormitory (aka: School on Holidays), we started drinking from a bottle that the friendly Czechs had just produced... but when our turn arrived we were requested to sign some Commandments like “We won’t jump on the beds” or “We won’t drink alcohol”...

Estevao said “Eeeeehhh???” and the woman said “If you prefer I can give you the Commandments in Spanish”.

And the rooms looked like if somebody had stolen the beds, so the “jumping commandment” sounded even more weird, but there were good mattresses on the floor and there was a TV, a DVD, a blackboard and a thinking game that Standa tried to solve with his Rambo knife.

We listened to the Farting Song (aka: PROOOT-Song) for the first time and we scared our Mexican roommates a little bit, and then we went to eat burritos in a Mexican Restaurant, and later we met almost the whole group in Volker’s Apartment’s Cellar, where we had an introductory meeting with strange games and soft drinks included, and we thought we had lost Anna (aka: Unrivalled Best Dancer) on the way out, but she was already waiting for us in the metro.

2. Magic Cards

We slept a little bit and went to the City Hall (aka: Stadshuset), the magic place where long weddings last 3 minutes, the red rooms are blue, and the winners of the Nobel Prize go to have their banquets.

The guide walked around even faster than Marika, but if you manage to keep an eye on her (without blinking) she would tell funny stuff like:

a) histories of Viking boats upside down used as roofs;

b) the trick of the missing statue (lazy architect puts an statue in one side of the door and let the other empty, not only avoiding half of the work but also expecting the people to believe that there was another statue and had been stolen, which is supposed to give extra prestige to the place);

c) the columns that were supposed to be male or female (but nobody was sure about which ones were what);

d) the corridor with noble heads of workers instead of heads of big bosses (that looked fair);

e) the Swedish Romantic Style stairs; and

f) the cool Golden Room that was really golden and with an amazing mosaic... but the artist got pissed off in the middle of the work so he draw himself arguing with the critics, and when he got too tired he let the horse-rider without head and the horse without body... quite weird stuff, indeed.

And of course we climbed the tower, saw a great view of Stockholm and took 10.000 pics.

Then we walked (runed) to the supermarket (to buy stuff for a picnic), and then to the Vasa Museum.

Archeology museums can usually be considered I.B.B. (i.e: interesting but boring), but the Vasa Ship (aka: The Swedish Titanic) was something special, and not only because it was old and huge.

You may wonder what’s so interesting about a rotten old boat and some sailors stuff from the XVII Century... Let me tell you:

Swedes (like Finns or Germans) are supposed to be very organized and efficient people: when they do something, it seems they always do it perfect and everything works alright... so, when in 1628 a Swedish boat was built so fucked up that it sank in its first trip, it was something so special that Swedes decided to recover it and open a museum.

I was so hungry I could have eaten one of the ducks that were wandering around, but I managed to wait till the Open Air Museum (aka: Skansen), where we sat on the grass and ate roasted chicken and paper bread (the Greeks say that “chicken, fish and girls must be enjoyed using the hands”, but not even Athanasia knew this saying).

There was only time for a ten-minute siesta on the floor, as we also went to take a look to the 150 cultural-historic buildings form all over Sweden, and the little zoo with no bears. We saw visons, seals, big birds, wolverines, foxes, reindeers, lynxs and cute little baby-lynxs, but we wanted to see bears!

And there were also some colorful painted horses, like the Mad Cows but without tits.

And then we run to a Touristic Boat Trip around Stockholm channels, where you could listen the History of Stockholm through earphones, in several different versions you could chose: the Standard English one was alright, but some people preferred to have a laugh listening the Children Version (fairytale style) or the Chinese one. In the background, sweetie music by Brian Adams or Elton John helped to create some atmosphere.

I managed to take another short siesta and ate some shity microwaveable rice with the Mexican guy, and then we headed to a Fucking Swedish Pub: 40 fucking crowns a beer, 20 fucking crowns to let my bag in the door (and I didn’t even wanted to leave it!). But it was even worse for our Rambo Guy, which knife was kidnapped.

He told the blonde guard he needed the knife for the salami and for many other things, but the guard told him he could spend 2 years in a Swedish jail.

I have no idea about the look of a Swedish jail, but I confess that I imagine them quite comfortable... Anyway, Standa preferred to give away all white weapons.

And our lovely organizers had managed to get for free Magic Cards (aka: Stockholmskortets, aka: Lovely little pieces of paper) valued on 260 crowns each day, that allowed us to use public transport and get into all the museums for free... So next day we spread around looking for our most suitable pieces of Culture.

Some people went to Pipi’s Museum (aka: Junibacken, aka: The Magic World of Astrid Lindgren).

This Pippi Langstrump (aka: Longstocking, aka: Calzaslargas) represents to Sweeden the same than the Happy Hyppos to Finland... But she’s a weird looking red-haired teenager with bizarre socks who is supposed to be stronger than Magnus Magnuson (aka: The Swedish Candidate to Strongest Man in The World), and her smile makes me nervous, so I preferred to try to impress some girls going to the Modern Art Museum and, of course, I couldn’t help explaining the Freudian symbolism to Imma (aka: Killer Loops, aka: Orlando’s friend).

There were some masterworks by Dalí, Miró, Picasso and this kind of people, but the thing that I was more pleased to see was Duchamp’s Toilet!

(Usually I don’t like very much people who put garbage into expositions, but Duchamp is somehow special because he was the one who started the fashion and because toilets are always fun).

We didn’t have much time, but we also took a 15-minute look into the National Gallery. Of course that 15 minutes aren’t enough to enjoy many works of Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Renoir, Gauguin... specially if you are a confused tourist who starts the visit in the floor dedicated to Swedish Design.

Sweden may be famous for IKEA and stuff like that, but I’ve never managed to find much charm in pieces of furniture like tables or chairs...

We had lunch in the Circle of the 14 Restaurants and we took a walk in the center... nice streets, by the way. When tired, we sat and drank hot chocolate (or ice-cream or white hot chocolate) in a really gay place, decorated with sophisticated pics and strong waiters.

And a really nice guide showed us the Royal Palace (aka: Kungliga Slottet), official residence of His Majesty the King of Sweden and his Sexy Daughters (but they didn’t even show up to receive AEGEE, lazy bastards!).

The Palace was a Baroque cozy house from the XVIII Century, with lots of Rococo stuff around, and the guide had almost one anecdote for each of our nationalities, and told us a funny mix of History and gossips.

“Is there any Irish between us?”

“Yeeeesss!!”

“Because once the Queen used a fork made with Irish steel...”

“Waaaaw...”

She also took us sightseeing around Gamla Stan (aka: the Old Town), quite nice also.

And we saw the Change of the Guards and made some fun of them and their shouts.

We also saw a huge Giant Finger that pointed to different directions depending of the current, and the Water Telephone (aka: Gossip Tubes), that were suposed to be used to tell your secrets to the water and listen also other people secrets. I told some bullshit to the tube, but when listening I only heard water moving, like if a Contemporary artist was pissing in my ear.

Interesting thing to notice: Sweedish Contemporary art is quite fun (for being Contemporary art), and it can be in the water instead of in museums (and that’s not so strange when you think that in Stockholm there’s so much water all around that most of the time not even the natives can tell if that’s lake, river, channel or sea).

I think I could have stayed a whole month in that civilized Stockholm, but it was not possible. The Love Boat was waiting to take us to Finland (aka: Suomi)...

The TSU had officially started and nobody wanted to miss it.

3. The Love Boat

According to the stereotypes, Finland may not be the best place for passion and coupling, but as you should know stereotypes are usually bullshit.

Anyway, some things that remind us that bullshit:

a) Finns claim that the most beautiful words in their language are: “Laiva lipui sillan alle” (and you may guess it’s something about love, but actually is something about a boat drifting under a bridge),

b) according to the Finnish lesson, when Finns want to say say “I love you” they say “you’re ok”;

c) according to the same lesson, Finns are supposed to propose marriage like this: “If there’s nothing else, should we get married?”...

d) they also have several good jokes like “How do you tell an extrovert Finn?”, “When conversing with you, he’s actually looking at your feet instead of his own”

e) and someone reported to have really heard a Finn using this pick-up line with girls in a disco: “Excuse me, girls, could you please tell me your names and what do you study?”...

But there are also some things that show the oposite of those stereotypes:

a) the Finns we met;

b) the Love Boat (aka: Viking Lines, aka: Amorella).

(At least the AEGEE Finns were really cool, and I didn’t have the oportunity to taste the pasion of Finnish girls, but most of them looked so sexy that you woudn’t have thrown them out of your bed for eating cookies...

And they knew the charm of romantic cruises!)

When, waiting in the harbor, Finnish girls told us with huge smiles in their faces that they like to call the ship “Fucking Boat” instead of “Love Boat”, everybody smiled back and expected the best.

Some Viking cheerleaders that looked like Magnus Magnuson’s sisters danced for us and did an introductory speech about the boat, and then they tried to persuade us to lose our last crowns in the Casino or spend all our money in the Duty Free Shops. All the trip was fun, but they were maybe the funniest of it.

So we left Sweden and sailed the Baltic Sea. There were little green islands all around and it was amazingly beautiful. The sun went down slow, everything was great, and party was on the air (we even introduced ourselves again and told more stereotypes about our countries, and sometimes I didn’t know if it was time to laugh or not, specially when talking about weapons or potatoes).

Actually, no much love occurred during the trip, but there are other pleasures in life besides love... for example:

a) sleeping in beds,

b) drinking cheap alcohol

It seems that the Love Boat had some trick with the Aland Islands that permitted to escape from the high prizes of the ALKO (aka: the State Alcohol Monopolistic Company)... and it had also the maybe most comfortable beds of the TSU... but we weren’t tired enough to appreciate the beds yet, so we bought some bottles of vodka, salmiakki (aka: candy flavored liquor), cider (quite different from the Spanish one, very sweet and in several different tastes, from pear to peach), beer and cava (aka: champagne) and we started wild parties in corridors and cabins. The boat had also a disco, of course, but corridors and cabins were more cozy.

We managed to put around 20 people in a little little pink cabin that was intended for 4 people sleeping 2 over 2. And everything was going alright, even better than in a Marx’s movie, till the Big Brother of Magnus (aka: The Guard of the Love Boat) arrived and tried to open the door... It was not easy, because the doors were to be open to inside, so he squashed several participants. He shouted “Everybody out of this cabin except 4 people!!” and we tried not to laugh, because he was very big and we didn’t want him to try to get in. He kept shouting and told us that if there was any other complain about noise, the 4 people in that cabin would have big problems.

Actually everybody had left the cabin but 6 of us: the 4 that faced the storm and the extra 2 that were squashed behind the door and didn’t dare to move.

The boat had such a lovely name and the pink walls were so kinky, that we didn’t expect such behavior from the guard... but we were nice and didn’t throw him to the water.

Two other sentences to remember from that night:

“I’m not sure if I’m feeling the movements of the boat or if it’s just the alcohol in my mind”

“We are under the water level... so please don’t open any window”

I also found a job as a bodyguard and I lost it in few hours, so after few minutes of disco I went to sleep. When I woke up we were already in Finland and it was the beginning of a long long day.

Actually I didn’t went to bed again till... well... actually I didn’t went to bed till 18 days later.

4. The Land of the Big Pink Mutant

The first -and still sleepy- impression from Turku (aka: Abo, aka: Tuuuurku) was a crowded bus and some banners advertising “LEFA”.

Let me tell you that Finnish is a very confusing language. Not only half of the vocals are extra-long, but they also use a lot of foreign dirty words with a clean local meaning.

Five examples:

a) “Lefa” is the worst Spanish slang for turnips milk... in Finland they put the word in candies advertising, next to hungry-looking thick lips and tongues.

b) “Cazzo merda” sounds quite bad in Italian... in Finnish it means “look at the sea”

c) “Cazzo succhia” means “suck my cazzo” in Italy and “look my socks” in Finland

d) A Spanish “marica” is a faggot... a Finnish Marika is a lovely girl with beautiful eyes who has traveled around the world studying Folklore...

e) And maybe it’s just a marketing trick, but the Finnish bags of chips have huge letters that say: “MEGAPUSSY!!”

And, talking about kinky stuff, must tell that the dormitory was on the University area, very close to Hesburger (aka: The Mytical Finnish McDonalds) and to the amazing Posankka (aka: the Big Pink Mutant)...

Because Posankka was town’s greatest hit: a huge and blue-eyed monster the size of 2 pink mammoths that may look like a gigantic spermatozoo from far, but if you pay attention you realize it’s just a genetic mix between a big duck and a big pig... The coolest mutant I’ve ever seen.

We queued a little bit for the toilet (as some smartass noticed: “one toilet should be enough... after all, there’s only one queue!”) and we slept a little bit and we were already ready for sightseeing.

So we discovered Turku, Finland’s oldest town and and “the world’s most beautiful archipelago, where many a heart is lost forever...” (I quote this from the booklet “Summer in Finland, a refreshing journey”), which was celebrating its 775th birthday (we even drunk a special beer bottled to commemorate the anniversary).

A confused tourist will have problems to find postcards in Turku, and may summarize the city like this:

a) a nice river (aka: Aura, aka: Aurajoki) full of pub-boats,

b) a Gothic Cathedral (aka: the Mother Church of the Lutheran Church of Finland),

c) and a Castle. (¿uh?)

At the other hand, the poet Jarkko Laine said something like: “when you walk through Turku, you may suddenly get an overwhelming sensation of history’s continuum”...

More or less that’s what we felt with that funny guy with a micro, a blue suit and a yellow tie with mummins on it. He explained absolutely every detail of the city, and some of them several times. Almost like: “this is the hospital... this is the market... this is the hospital from the other side... that’s a blue car... and that’s a cat crossing the street... and that’s the hospital again...”

Most people didn’t look very interested, but the guy never lost his smile (despite he neither stopped sweating), and at the end of the tour he said: “I’m sorry it only lasted 2 hours”, like if there were other things to see or like if he wanted to show us another side of the hospital.

We had already seen even the neighborhood where dentists invented xylitol, the bottom of Paavo Nurmi (the athlete who claims he usually doesn’t run naked in Turku), and the Open Air Handicrafts Museum (aka: Luostarinmaki)...

In Spain we don’t have museums like this Luostarinmaki thing... well, actually we have something similar, but instead of calling them museums we just consider them as grandparent’s towns.

The one in Turku was supposed to be special because the 18 old wooden houses still stand exactly in the same site as when they were built 200 years ago (in Spain we would have considered it special if some of the houses would have moved...). I couldn’t stop laughing while hearing Nuria (aka: Multi-SU Girl), specially amazed and saying stuff like “waw, my grandmother has exactly the same chair... and that spoon also!”

And there were a couple of people trying to preserve those occupations which technological progress had made unnecessary, but they (specially the blonde handsome guy) looked like having even less interest in handicrafts than the tourists themselves.

And I, always interested on creepy things, asked the guide about the Big Pink Mutant, if it had some symbolism or some hidden meaning or who knows what.

He said: “eh... well... it doesn’t mean anything... it’s... eh... just a duck and a pig... together... eh... it’s beautiful...” and in that very same moment we were passing behind the thing and everybody turned the head trying to enjoy the beauty of its huge and pink bottom: two huge buttocks and a big curly tail (that was a real killer loop!).

When we came back we had a dance lesson: “1,2... 1,2... 1,2...” and “1,2,3, jump! 1,2,3, jump!”. Quite difficult stuff, I have to admit, even for those who could tell the difference between the right foot and the left one!

And I usually don’t like disciplined dances, but the ritual had some charming old-fashioned rules:

1) girls must wait in line till the boy picks them (i.e: Meat Market)

2) girls must not refuse any boy, unless he’s dreadful drunk

3) girls must not complain if boys dance like engineers and step on their foot, but boys must always apologize (even when the girl makes the mistake)

4) boys shouldn’t ask for the girls’ name, unless they want to fuck

5) girls shouldn’t ask for the boys’ name, unless they want to fuck

Mmmh... seems fair, and asking for the name sounds better than the standard lines like “do you want to come home to see my stamps collection?”.

We then had our first sauna (we were still not sure about the point of it, specially considering that in Spain we almost only see saunas on porno movies, so making 2 turns and going there only with naked people from the same gender was quite uncomfortable... even before Petri announced he was going to do “the helicopter”!), and we ate something and then went to a boat-pub, where we met some Brazilian girls and drunk some red iced stuff from the forests that was supposed to contain alcohol (and payed ALKO prices, of course).

Then we helped the Brazilian girls to get into the Night Club Giggling Marlin (they didn’t even have the legal age of 20!), and I was happy to dance some hours (without any discipline nor rituals) with Anna (aka: Energy Bomb) and Alexandra (aka: From Montpellier) the funkiest music in town: Stevie Wonder, James Brown and old Motown stuff.

It was quite fun, but I didn’t dare to ask for their names.

5. Exploring the Deepest Finland

We also went to Ruissalo Island and received a lesson about Finnish nature at Honkapirtti.

It’s said that Finland is one of the countries in the world that shows more respect to Nature. As an honest (and modest) Finn said: “well, actually it’s not so difficult to show respect to Nature in big countries where there are more forests than people!”.

And they really have lots of cute animals, not only reindeers and mooses. Everybody’s favorites were the flying squirrels, which are so protected that when they shit somewhere you cannot build a road in that place anymore... so when some Finn is worried because an ugly road is going to be built next to his garden, he goes to look for flying squirrels shit pieces in national parks, carries some of them to his area, show the brownies to the authorities... and the road plan is over!

I’ve no words to describe the Finnish “Sopa de Pellejos”, so I’ll just tell that after lunch we went for a walk and that Marika (aka: Ghosts Expert) told us about the Love Ghost who only appears to people who are really in love.

We played picapuc (aka: pilla-pilla) in Picapuc Street and later we run under a storm, with a nice lake on the right and rich cottages on the left, till a café where we had some tea, with my wet underwear hanging from a chair like if it was a jacket. (And that was the place where we saw “el mosquito más fuerte que un vikingo” who had crashed against the wall).

I was lucky to have swimming-suit and towel with me, not because I expected the shower, but because we had even planned to swim in the sea.

Back in the dorm, we opened the VIP Room, a non-snoring ghetto formed by several girls and me, helping each other to chose the clothes... and then we went to the dance-hall with our best dresses.

In the bus we started to ask “where are we going?” or “what the fuck is going on?” because most of our bus-mates had 50s looks like Johnny Roqueta or John Travolta, but in the Valasranta Dance Hall the atmosphere was heterogenic enough, from young tattooed ex-convicts and naive teenagers to gentle elders and businessman-looking nerds, all of them dancing the Finnish folk and doing the Meat Market Ritual like if it was something natural for them. I swear I even saw tough guys with AC/DC t-shirts enjoying the party and the soft sweet songs like if they were in an heavy-metal concert.

And the music was really cool, I even bought the CD of A.Aallon Rymiorkesteri called “Satelliittitaivas” (really Finnish name, not only vocals are doubled but also some consonants!), but I was afraid of not doing the steps alright... till Alexandra (aka: Butterfly Chaser) convinced me to fuck the steps and enjoy the hug, and then everything was fun... till the “happy hour” started and the Meat Marked changed sides: it was Girls’ Turn to chose their favourite boys from the line... so I runed away (the idea of not being chosen by anyone was almost as scary as the idea of being chosen by someone!).

And later I danced with Anna till her feet started bleeding.

We came back in Vellu’s car, and Milos (aka: The Man Who Invented Gueboisne) told us about car crashes and about the crazy roads of Serbia; and later some wise man said something like: “if I have to crash with an animal, I prefer it to be an eel than a moose”...

Thanks God, the driver was better than the conversation.

And next day we went to Naantali (aka: Stormy “Sunshine” Town), which is quite beautiful, with harbour and hills, tourist shops, art galleries and cute trains.

With the previous day experience, several of us were carrying swimming suit in one hand and raincoat in the other (and specially useful was the second one, again).

But first we saw the Garden of the President of Finland.

The Mediterranean visitors were still amazed by the fact that Mr.President in Finland is a female human being, when something else shocked them even more: the fact that the flowers of the garden were organized by colors: here all the red ones, later all the yellow ones and later the blue and the purple ones... The smartass comments couldn’t be avoided: “that’s really Finn!” or “imagine in Germany: they would organize the garden alphabetically!”

And there I heard for first time about Moomins (aka: Happy Hippos, aka: Fucking Hippos) who are famous in most countries but not in Spain, and who, despite all evidence and despite all the nicknames, are supposed to be trolls and not hippos. Moominworld (aka: Finnish Eurodisney) was there, at the end the Moomin Train that we didn’t take, but we entered the Moomin Shop and girls bought smoothie dildos (aka: hattivatti, aka: hattifnatters) and other souvenirs.

And we run around town, under one of our worst storms, trying to answer really difficult questions about Kaj Stenvall’s paintings, Peltonen’s family, summer snow balls, air defense bases and Paavonpolku’s stairs... One of the most difficult city rallies of my life, but very educational. I still remember that the name of the electricity center on Lappalaistenkatu is not “Cazzo Merda Electrico” and that the guy high on the rocks don’t think that the policemen “have nice uniforms” neither he “wants to be handercuffed and sodomized”... and that the poem that starts with “sa olit perhonen” does not finnish with “the roof is on fire”.

And Naantali is a quite touristic place, so they manage to sell a lot of stuff to tourists... even snowballs in august. And a gentle shop-keeper, being asked about snowballs prizes by a pretty girl decided to give her a free one, but she didn’t know what to do with it and gave it to a child on the street. The parents weren’t happy: “fucking tourists! are you crazy? don’t give snow balls to our son! don’t you know it will be falling real snow from the sky in less than a month!”

I tried to quit the rally, but it was not possible, I also tried to torture Michele (aka: the Confused) and Marcos (aka: Mr Jukebox) to force them to tell me the answers, but it was pointless, as they didn’t know anything.

The only problem was the fucking rain, most of us ended up totally wet and it wouldn’t have been so disgustingly funny if the touristic brochures hadn’t called the place “Naantali: the Sunshine Town”.

And I also remember when, inside the bus, the guide had told us: “if you look to the right, you will see the Sun...” and of course she was just talking about some yellow flowers arranged in the Sun shape...

All I can say is... look at the sea electrico!

We came back, we fought a little bit for a warm shower (“eh!!! You lied to me!”, “come on! women always lie!”), we tried with few success the Funny Sex Story Contest (“Excuse me, you said that you did it on a sofa or that you did suffer?”) and we had a lovely barbeque. Some wise people prepared even salmon, I shared an interestingly huge sausage with Alessio (aka: Barcelona-SU Veteran) and drunk sponsored beer with little pieces of broken glass (and it felt good!).

In the morning we went for a walk around Tuuuurku, seeking postcards with few success. Some people even went into museums and came back with a brochure that contained a quote that said something like “art makes you free, art makes you think” (and it wouldn’t have sound so stupid if the author of the quote weren’t the Catalan artist Antoni Tapias, whose greatest hit is a dirty sock).

I went with Nuria to the street market and we saw how much care they put into fresh fruits (maybe that’s why they are a little bit more expensive than in Spain) and we learned about the different kinds of salmon and we promised we were going to come back tomorrow.

And, of course, before leaving Turku I had to climb onto Posankka’s pink tail and took some pictures... (but I did them with that film that I later exposed directly to sunlight).

6. Little kisses from nature

The Little Flying Bastards (aka: Finland’s Air Force, aka: mosquitoes) had already tasted my blood during the barbeque in Turku, but that was nothing compared with the festival of the Finnish Cottage in the Kurjenrahka National Park.

There were some tough guys saying stuff like: “after the first 200 bitings you don’t feel pain anymore”, or “come on, be positive: think that only female mosquitoes bite”, or “isn’t it great to be sucked all night long?” but somehow there were people with hard skins in which the bittings disappear after 1 or 2 days, while the Spanish chickens (aka: Nuria and me) collected hundreds of spots of different colors, from pink to blue (including all kinds of red and purple), despite the fucking mosquito repellent, the after-bite unworking cream and the vodka-honey Estonian remedy (thanks Kyli!), so we end up buying cortisone (with the help of a lovely organizer that took good care of us) and taking baths on it.

Those little flying bastards could even suck you trough your socks or t-shirt, and sometimes you managed to hit one of them (sweet and pointless revenge) and you got either a little black souvenir in your hand (pre-sucking hit) or a bloody big red drop (post-sucking hit)...

I become totally paranoid, each time I heard bzzzzzz I started spanking my face.

But Nature is much more than mosquitoes, there are also the dry toilettes and the spoon showers! (no, I’m joking, the place was wonderful, but before talking about beautiful Finnish mountains I want to get over the traumas of the indoor pyramids).

You may wonder what kind of pyramids can you find in Finland... ask Alessio for details! He just wanted to be polite and offered his help to the organizers, they gave him a shovel and invited him to flatten the... ehem... you know what I mean (or, if you don’t know what I mean, good for you!).

The Finnish toilets, in the civilized areas, call the attention of the toilet-interested tourist because of their automatic devices: the water turning on and off like magic, the towels appearing and disappearing, and –best of everything- that little extra shower from the sink that you can use to clean your favorite parts of the body...

But the Cottage Lifestyle is different, there are no little extra showers as there are no real showers and as there is no flushable water to remove the pyramid away... But the toilets have some other interesting characteristics:

a) you can find them single (as usual) or coupled (so you can go with your best friend, and grab hands and tell each other “push! push!”)

b) you can lock the door from outside (there was one toilet lockable from both sides, but the one that could only be locked by someone else was really disturbing...)

c) you can enjoy nature trough the front door window (specially in that one that didn’t even have a glass and was extra-crowded by flies and other insects)

So, of course, a lot of people used the public forest toilets and it was advisable not to walk barefoot around the grass.

The shower was also special: it consisted in a bucket and a big spoon, and we used it inside the sauna, usually with sweating people sitting in front of you. Really kinky. This may seem uncomfortable for someone, but others enjoyed it for hours and hours, specially when we finally convinced the organizers of stopping the apartheid and taking mixt saunas.

Everybody shouted for their rights: “naked! naked! naked!”; but later, boys turn was naked, girls turn was naked, and mixt turn was with swimming suits or underwear or naked if your name have 5 letters and starts by P.

Someone said something like “last days we didn’t see him very much, today we have really seen a lot of him!”. He just said: “adults over 20 should be mature enough to see each other nude” and I totally agree, but I was to shy to follow the example.

And, of course, there was also the Salmiakki Lake (I don’t know the real name, I call it like this because of its not-very-crystalline waters, which looked red or black depending of the light).

The usual process was sauna-lake-sauna-lake-sauna-lake-sauna... till you feel like you can’t sweat nor swim anymore and then you use the Shower Emulator (aka: Bucket & Spoon) and you get dressed.

First time we did it at night, very beautiful, with the moon and the stars, but it wasn’t till we did it daytime that we realized the magic properties of the muddy lake: when you came out of it, all the little hairs from your body had become extra-long and extra-dark (I don’t know what substance created that effect, but for sure it was not just water and mud). I looked at my own chest and I had never seen it so hairy and virile, so I showed it to Marcos: “hey! I look like a real man!”. He said: “oh, yes, it’s quite disgusting, but the worse are the ladies... they also look like real men...”

It was true, you could even draw hearts with your finger in their brown and hairy backs, and I don’t even want to imagine the scene if people had listened to the “naked-naked” shouts!

But we were still in Automaatic-Land, so, even if there were neither showers neither flushable toilettes, there had to be some gadget to show the technological power of the North. The magic device was this time a paper towel machine over the sink... It worked like this: when you were cleaning your teeth in the kitchen and you moved your head forward to spit, the machine liked to offer towels and towels directly to your face, like in a low-budget sci-fi parody.

And we didn’t have much alcohol (despite the European Night Previews), but people heard the call of the wild and everybody’s instincts were easy to reach. Nightmares were everynights routine (“eh, tú! despertamos a los otros?!”); and (despite the lack of hygiene) coupling finally started (well, there are rumors that coupling had started earlier in Turku, but just for the good ones!).

You can blame the stars, the flowers, the romantic fires and barbeques, the moon’s reflection on the lake, and the teenager’s game with empty bottles... blame whatever you want, but love was in the air even more than in the fucking cabins of the Love Boat!

The atmosphere was so wild that some free soul, blinded by passion, even burned the Gossip Sacred Box!

“Nooooooo!!!”, shouted Susana (aka: Super AEGEE-CD Veteran), and jumped to the fire like saving a little baby, but it was too late... Who knows what messages were inside that little Pandora Thing, who would have preferred those secrets burned and why.

As an homage, I’ll copy some messages from previous editions (exclamation marks omitted to make it shorter):

a) “Estevao and Veronika left the elevator running after each other”

b) “Killer loops are killing me”

c) “Petri did the helicopter in the sauna”

d) “Finnish ferry guards are unhappy bastards”

e) “I want to do a lot of sauna party”

f) “Everybody is drunk. Now we will chose between the life and the death.”

g) “Fuck Abba. They are not Finnish”

h) “Hesburger rules”

i) “Nuria, you wanna go to the lake by car?”

j) “We need a beer” ...

And, talking about beer and silly sentences, maybe it’s a good moment to remember those impolite cottage quotes that were never captured inside any carton box:

a) “next person who tells me that beer in my country is expensive and bad, I’ll tell him to go to Finland”

b) “where is my bag? the TSU is over!”

c) “nature, so beautiful, so annoying”

d) “are you left or right in your political opinions?”, “right”, “uf, I just fucked my girlfriend”

e) “enjoy the moment, never ask for activities, remember what happened to Alessio”

f) “if you don’t speak English, what’s the point of traveling?”

g) “where are the beds?”

7. The bright side of cottage life

Early in the morning, we raised the flag (not a national flag, not the European flag, but the one and only AEGEE flag).

Actually they say than Finns in cottages usually raise flags exactly at 9:00 and everybody must wake up earlier and nobody eats anything till the flag is up... thanks Aegee, our organizers weren’t so strict... actually they were really nice, otherwise we couldn’t have listened to so many speeches... (or we would have interrupted them with the “naked! naked!” shouts more often).

Must say that the best speecher I’ve ever met was there, and he used most of his speeching power those days in the cottage... his name was Niklas (aka: The Man of the 100 Speeches, aka: The Organizer that AEGEE-Barcelona Would Love to Hire) and had a self-inflicted tattoo and a beer cup he carried around just in case someone pretended to offer him a plastic glass.

And, of course, we had the traditional AEGEE introduction (but it was 20 questions’ style, and Michal ruled) and the Finnish Language Lesson.

By that time, most of us could already speak Finnish “almost fluently” and we could concentrate all our efforts into learning their longest word, that goes like this: “epajarjelmallistyttamattomyydellansakaankohan” (I’ve omitted some dots over vocals but I swear the rest is like this... and I hope they don’t use this word too often when playing the hangman game!).

Niklas also read some funny rules and translations (and explained them very carefully, one by one).

And for sure it was weird to see such interesting characters like him or Petri or Susanna looking like trying to convince us that Finns were shy and boring... and using funny jokes and huge smiles at the same time... (but I always say that AEGEE people are not good representatives of their countries, because they are always too good compared to the average)

Anyway, stereotypes are fun, so I’ll copy the Basic Rules to Speak Finnish Language that they read (and explained) to us:

a) if you don’t absolutely have to open your mouth, don’t open your mouth,

b) if you have to say something sweet, profound or personal, try to find the shortest sentence which can be interpreted in various ways

c) avoid words “love” and “care” and all superlatives

d) whatever happens, hide your feelings (unless you’re drunk)

And, well, it’s about time to stop the bullshit at say something nice:

Cause we were in the Kurjenrahka National Park (aka: Crane’s Moss Park) and it was an awesome place. Extra-interesting for Spaniards and people from southern climates, but beautiful for everybody with eyes in his face.

Kurjenrahka is an 2600-hectare area of bogs, marshes, shady spruce forests and fringed lakes, with lots of sundews (aka: droseras) and water lilies (aka: nuphars), 45 species of butterflies, and gragon flies and caddis flies (aka: trichoptera) and lots of little flying bastards... the water is great for the insects and the insects feed billions of birds like lapwigs, snipes, geese, swans, cranes, woodpeckers, sandpipers, cuckoos... (I confess I’m copying from a booklet, some of those things I have no idea how they look like... and most of the animals I actually saw were either little flying bastards or TSU participants, but I paid a lot of attention looking for the famous flying squirrels (aka: pteromys volans); and believe me: the place was amazing, being in the middle of that was a real privilege even without showers).

So, of course, we did a lot of hiking: the first day just few brave people exploring the area without any idea about where to go, the second day we were already guided by Marika but it was still a warming up, and the third one was already the big excursion and she took us really far away along those thin wooden paths and the thick forests...

The paths were specially interesting for me. You don’t know what will happen if you lose the way and put a foot in the swam, and you must walk one by one, very disciplined... so I tried all the time to be either the first in the line so nobody spoils the view, either behind a girl with a nice bottom, for obvious reasons.

And we saw no bears, but we saw a couple of worms and, of course, lots of flying bastards kissed us all the way long.

People ate a lot of little fruits from the forest, but I didn’t, as I was trying to avoid contact with cottage toilets as much as possible.

Marika told us about naked girls who turn into trees when they turn their back (letting naive tourists who follow them totally lost), and also about the technique of putting a stick into an ants nest (really scary ants, by the way, they were always doing the “horse attack” (aka: el caballito) and trying to bite you!), as they were supposed to pee on the stick and it was supposed to be nutritive.

And we also saw the memorial stone of the “red” guy Athi Jalonen who loved a “white” girl (it doesn’t mean that their sons were going to be pink, but that one of them was pro-commie and the other one not). Of course, there could be no happy end... he was shot to death in the middle of the forest when he was just 17 years old.

Besides this, a good point for Finland is that cellular phones (aka: mobiles) work absolutelly everywhere! We were able to chase butterflies and happily get lost in the forest, and then call Marika:

“hello! I’m lost!”

“well... you don’t have any idea about where are you?”

“yes, yes, I’m next to a big tree...”

And Finnish people cooked for us, from envelope soups and morning pottage to really good stuff, rectangular fish crockets, risotto, Finnish paella, boiled fried potatoes, home-made berry mouse, barbequed sausages, home-made pancakes with marmalade (absolutelly-fucking-delicious!)...

And the Czech guys also collected mushrooms and cooked them... First I was a little bit reluctant (every year several people die in Catalunya just from tasting wild mushrooms), but I was brave and they were great, and you cannot refuse food when the cheff is so kind to bring it to the sauna.

At night, we watched the stars and the moon... and some people tried to play with Czech cards (crazy ones, with bearded queens, scary devils and bizarre jokers...), and someone put down the AEGEE flag and raised above our heads my beloved pants of the hearts and the fucking elephants (Sophia, if you ever read this, be very proud!)

But anyway, some of us were in urgent need of a shower, so we made an escape plan (in the middle of AEGEE lecture) and decided to sail till the other side of the river, then do the helicopter and fly away.

When the D-day arrived, I jumped into the Green Boat with 4 strong girls who didn’t let me row too much, and we sang songs like Yellow Submarine (I heard rumors that all the boats were singing that, like if they were expecting the worse) and some other pop hits and also Girl Scouts Hymns, leaded by Alex and Kyli.

At the other side of the lake we stepped into the private house of some patient Finns who looked at us a little bit worried... but they didn’t complain too much about those noisy tourists who were taking pictures of their garden.

We were almost free, but somehow we felt guilty and decided to come back to our organized TSU (maybe because it was the last cottage day and rumors said that real showers were waiting for us in Helsinki)... but my turn to row was arriving, so I escaped from the Green Boat stealing Paolo’s canoe (far easier to row than the boat, but also far more lonely)... as a revenge Paolo stole my beloved slippers and I almost went back to the other side looking for them.

8. Agents in Sinky, Hell Sinky

The bus that took us back to civilization stopped in Lohja, where we ate some rice and bittersweet stuff in a Chinese Restaurant and visited the Funny Mine (aka: Spy Training Camp, aka: Tytyri Mine Museum), an interesting and ridiculous place 350 meters below the sea level.

In the old times it used to be a serious limestone mine, now it’s:

a) a serious limestone mine, plus

b) an elevator testing laboratory (aka: Kone Oys, aka: High Rise Laboratory), plus

c) a mine lifestyle museum (composed of 10 pictures, a drill, a dumper, a mine truck and 2 shovels), and

d) some entertainment complex for tourists with a jumpey soul.

They gave us funny helmets and told us we were going to be trained to be secret agents (that kind of secret agents who wear funny helmets and jump around... not exactly like the glamorous James Bond or the discrete spies from Greene or LeCarré), and we learned to climb rope-stairs, we used blow-guns (we told the guide she could teach us to do a “very good blow-job” but her face looked like if someone had already told that joke before), we built radio-receivers with empty beer boxes and we jumped from here to there.

When someone didn’t feel like jumping, she had a ready-made speech: “this game is about knowing your limits, good secret agents must know their limits, if you don’t want to jump you’re also a winner...” and it was so humiliating that I almost said “ok! ok! I’ll jump! I’ll jump! and I’ll do it without the fucking rope!”

I expected some rough miners to rescue us from that nightmare, but they had a serious job some meters below us.

And we were not informed about the details of our first mission, all we knew is that it was going to take part in Helsinki (aka: Helsingfors).

There, there weren’t beds neither, but there were proper showers!

We used them to clean ourselves just in case we had to seduce some enemy spies (Bond’s style), and we ate some pasta and I saw Rica again (aka: one of the prettiest participants of the previous TSU-Spain), but she was like a shooting star, appearing and disappearing fast!, and I met Jaakko (aka: one of the participants of the next TSU-Catalonia) and I poured his tea.

Then we went to an Irish Pub where a cover band was killing The Beatles without any sign of respect. The beer was expensive but not too bad, the company was cool, and the banners were funny. My 2 favorites:

a) “There are no strangers, there are just friends you haven’t meet”

b) “Working is the curse of the drinking classes”

Next day, proper sightseeing started: the Rock Church (aka: a hole in a mountain used as a church and concert hall at the same time); the Uspenski Cathedral (aka: Byzantine-Russian style largest Orthodox church in Western Europe); the Neo-Classical buildings in the Senate Square; the streets of the Eira District; the Katajanokka District; the Jugen architecture; the Modernist buildings of Alvar Aalto (aka: the Finnish Gaudí); etcetera.

And the sky was finally blue, except for some cotton clouds that some artist had arranged just behind the Big White Church.

In the lovely market next to the harbor you could buy little pieces of bread with salmon (mmmhh... gooood...), and all kind of strange souvenirs including funny long hats, really expensive postcards, and teddy reindeers with magnets inside their legs.

Next to it there was a woman taming cats. The tamed cats were just tamed cats, indeed, not tamed lions or tamed panthers, and they were doing the usual stuff that cats do, but anyway it looked interesting as there was a big group of people around her.

A little bit further there were some Native American Indians playing Ennio Morricone’s songs, like the typical Peruan fluters but with feathers and far more noisy.

We had lunch in the Unicafe: the food was quite good and reasonably inexpensive, and the home made beer was interesting:

“it’s brown, quite warm, it doesn’t look like beer, it doesn’t taste like beer, it has no alcohol... how the fuck do they know it’s beer?”

Then, most people went to Contemporary Art Museum (aka: Kiasma), but I’m not very kind in this kind of stuff, so I missed the opportunity of buying friendly neo-hippie pins with lemmas like:

a) “Peace, love and all that shit”

b) “House-keeping is a Science but I’m into Arts”

c) “My sexual preference is often”

d) “Me want nasty”

e) “I’ve found Jesus. He was behind the sofa the whole time”

f) “Let’s make love and blame it on the liquor”

g) “I love sensitive man: they’re easier to take advantage of”

or h) “Ignorance may be bliss, I woudn’t know”...

Instead, I went with Stefan (aka: The Quiet Gentleman) and some intelectual girls to a proper museum: the Ateneum (aka: National Gallery). And we felt very clever, even when, inside the museum, we were asking the guards “where is the museum! where is the museum! where is the museum!”

The Neo-Renaissance building, designed by Theodor Hoijer, was quite nice itself, and in its main entrance there was this carved motto: “Concordia res parvae crecunt” (“Through unity small things do grow”) and we didn’t find out if it was also supposed to be a Freudian joke or nor.

Inside, there were works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Chagall, Modigliani... but also a lot by some surprising Finnish artists who I had never heard about before. My favorite: Aksely Gallen-Kallela, whose national-romantic paintings were weird looking and breathtaking at the same time.

One of the greatest hits: “The Aino Myth Triptych”: If I got it right, this huge canvas was about the legend of an ugly old man who tried to seduce a pretty young girl, but she (being an unconsidered bastard) preferred to dive and die into the river than to kiss that decadent man... at the end, he is sad and she become a siren... and it symbolizes the imposible reach of youth and beauty but also the history of Finland... (I promise! I read this explanation in the museum! if somebody understand the metaphor, please tell me!)

I also keep a special memory of a Marilyn Monroe t-shirt, but I couldn’t find any postcard of it in the souvenirs section.

(By the way, I noticed also that a lot of the greatest Finnish painters were female painters, and it may sound normal in a civilized country where even the President is a fem-president, but I assure you it’s not something usual in other parts of the word... “Extra point for Finland!”)

Then, Stefan and me escaped from the shopping ladies and went for a walk into the Botanical Garden (fuck! actually we thought we were taking a shortcut!)

I hardly had time to take sauna, shower and cortisone, because we had to run to the Konstan Molja Restaurant... Quite a great place!

We ate like pigs and the waitress treated us like gentlemen, offering us to taste the wine before serving it, very sophisticated!

And we finally tasted the reindeer meat (rumors said that inside Hesburger sanwiches there was also reindeer and moose meat, but the natives don’t think so) with mashed potatoes and fruits from the forest, and salmon and other fishes whose names I don’t know, and a lot of tasty stuff... But foreigners are not used to sit for hours enjoying a good meal, so in 20 minutes they were already outside waiting for the lazy bastards that didn’t want to leave till finnishing all the buffet... “I’m just in the 3rd round! come on! give me a break!”

We run to Niklas place, a nice nest crowded like a metro at 8:00, and he managed to sell some jewellry (cow shaped or macarroni shaped jewells) while Michele played guitar (“bamba! bamba!”), others drunk sponsored beer, others talked about the meaning of life and about how fucking rich were those Finns (and how nice it must be to live in a proper Wellfare System), or just sat on the window looking for little currents of fresh air.

Then we went to a pub, danced just a little bit, and discrete people escaped to another pub.

And we slept a little bit and we started the next day running to get a tram.

Imagine you are the driver and you see someone turning the corner running to get into your tram... I guess you’ll have no problem in waiting few seconds for him... But when this tourist gets in another one appears, also running to get in... you’ll probably wait few seconds more... Etcetera till the 20 participants got into the tram, one by one, and then started shouting “who has the tickets! who has the tickets!” and later “naked! naked! naked!”

And the tram took us to the harbor and a boat took us to Suomelinna (aka: Sveaborg) where we saw the Lighthouse Church, the Fortress and lots of people sunbathing on the grass or on rocky “beaches”, like human seals.

And we played the Finnish Olympics.

Here are the different games we played, next to the marks of the Flying Reindeers Team (aka: FRT, aka: Not the Winners but Almost):

a) Skiing Without Snow -> 2 minutes, 20 seconds

b) Rubber Boot Throwing -> 13 meters

c) Sahly (aka: Finnish Golf) -> 4 points

d) Matches Throwing -> 9.1 meters

e) Wife Carrying -> 1 broken leg, 2 bruises

“Mmmh... maybe we should try throwing wifes and carrying matches”, said Toby (aka: The Man I Would Vote for the Olympic Comitee).

And we will never know if the organizers were joking or not when they told us that trowing black boots away and running around carrying your significant half were traditional Finnish sports...

Maybe we could have almost believed the thing of the boots, if it weren’t for the fact that Petri put the boot on the top of the fortress wall that was just in the opposite direction...

Despite yesterday’s gorgeous dinner, and despite all the cakes and stuff that the organizers had offered to us, everybody had an Egg Trauma. You could ask any participant to descrive Northern food in 4 words and they would have said “boiled eggs! boiled eggs!”...

I used to call them “chicken caviar”, but that didn’t help much...

So that night we took revenge and everybody cooked (or at least served something) in one of the coolest European Cooking Nights I’ve ever seen:

There was Spanish tortilla, Catalan bread with tomato and fuet, Italian pasta, Alessios’ home-made pizzas (“bravo!”), crepes, pancakes, haribo candies, Brazilian caipirinha (almost as funny to see the preparation than to drink it), turrones, French paté of olives and anchoves, Polish koretzali, a couple of strange soups, Greek extra-garliky tsaltsiki (good love test!), bread, some other stuff I don’t remember or don’t know how to name it (sorry)... and lots and lots of alcohol.

Organizers had invited us to use proper private kitchens, but some of us preferred to cook in the little kitchen of the dormitory: 12 people, 4 national dishes, in 4 squared metres!

By the way, a special prize for Gergo (aka: the Hungarian Chef, aka: Best Photographer) and his tomato thing that in my opinion was specially good!

The place where we ate all the stuff was also very cool: with music, TV, terrace, billiard, sofas, showers and sauna (of course); and it was situated on the top of a students’ residence in the Red Light District of Helsinki.

Our beloved Susana (who was so popular in the area that there was even a sex shop named after her) explained us that the place was cool but it wasn’t a good neighborhood. Her exact words were:

“only bums, hookers, students and artists live here”.

But (maybe thanks to our friends and thanks to palinkas, ouzos, vodkas, toros, grappas and stuff like that) we didn’t feel unsafe at all.

9. Estonian Runaway

One of the brochures about Helsinki says: “everything is within easy reach: the Finnish capital is a metropolis with human dimensions” which some smartass translated into: “it’s a small city, there’s not much to see”

...so we decided to escape one day and take a look at Estonia.

But we went alone, without our efficient organizers, and you could feel it in the air... “shall I keep all the tickets?”, said some Italian while waiting for the ferry. “No way! give them to the Germans!”, shouted someone else.

And for some strange reason, Kyli refused to waste one day of her trip visiting her own country, but she was so kind to call her friend Merle (aka: the Estonian Angel), who waited for us in Tallin’s Harbor (the Linda Lines one) and was so brave and pacient to guide us around Tallinn... or at least to try.

There was also Nicola (aka: the Guy Who Knew the Secret of Cognos) and he also knew the place, but the rest of the group was a mess, stopping every 5 seconds to take 100 pictures and chasing butterflies here and there. As soon as I got some Estonian money I escaped (thanks for the complicity of some good friends) and did some relaxed sighseeing (without cameras!).

It was worthwhile: Tallinn is awesome, really really beautiful, and I enjoyed a lot walking from here to there, without having any rumb (at the beggining I was carrying a map with the typical sights, but soon I realized all the narrow streets in the center were nice and that all the buildings in that area were interesting sights, so I bended the map and put it in my pocket).

There, one of every 10 buildings was an art gallery, and one of every 4 was a tourist shop. There were also lots of restaurants and, who knows why, all the girls were pretty!

Nicola had already challenged me to find an ugly Estonian girl... and I couldn’t (once I thought I had seen one, but I came closer and realized she was an American tourist).

And cars are not allowed in the historical centre, that’s also nice.

But walking alone in the center of Tallinn is dangerous... Nobody tried to rob me or rape me, but there were dozens of those pretty girls with red uniforms that called you from every corner... and their calls were like siren songs, if you stop and listen to them, they would give a lot of smiles and conversation till you end up buying their fucking postcards!

OK, the postcards were also nice, but I’m sure I would have bought far less of them if they were not using that tricky technique, half way between Jehova witnesses and Ramblas hookers! (“I didn’t want to buy anything, but the postcard girl was so nice and she explained me all the buildings in that square and also where to go to eat something...”)

Some of them had also banners that said “postcards for free!!” and actually you had to first buy 5 and then the 6th one was the free one... lovely and pretty bastards!

I also spent some time talking with an old woman (not so beautiful, and dressed in dark grey instead of the shiny red uniform) who managed to sell me Lenin pins... after explaining me all the history of Estonia and the USSR, and the fact that Lenin (aka: Camarade Vladimir Ilich Ulianov) was really handsome when he was young but got spoiled with the years and the beard...

I also saw some hare-krishnas singing and dancing around, but I tried not to listen to them just in case they also wanted to sell me something.

And I ate some lovely Estonian chistorras with Estonian warm escalivada and a big inexpensive beer (finally!) and later I met the group with the help of Standa (aka: Pub Relations) in the Hell Hunt Pub (aka: the one with the naked lady riding a horse), where the food is good and the sofas very confortable...

(By the way, rumors said that the previous day had been Standa’s sister weeding: SMS her my congratulations!)

We also visited another restaurant just for fun, because it was decorated like in the medieval times, with candlelight and all that shit, and we even took some pictures and went out without eating anything. Maybe it was a little bit impolite, but I think that you should be ready for that if you have a restaurant that gives more importance to the appearance than to the food, no?

And we walked even more and we rested a little bit in the grass of a park and then we went to have dinner and beer in the Scotland Yard Pub, another funny place where all the walls were covered with books and guns and other cryminal stuff... and there were leather sofas instead of chairs, police-women instead of waitress, and electrical chairs instead of toilets... So kinky!

But girls in sexy police uniforms didn’t distract me, I was still amazed by the beauty of Tallinn and I said to our Estonian expert:

“I cannot believe that all the city is so fucking beautiful! tell me that we have only been into the touristic ghetto and that around it the city is normal!”.

The answer was: “even worse than normal”...

In the boat way Helsinki-Helsinki they told us safety instructions about life jackets and things like that. I don’t think they told that in the way Helsinki-Tallinn, so maybe the new captain was more dangerous than the previous one... and the storm with lots of thunderlights, and the film of Dracula that was on the TV didn’t help to calm down the nerves of the passengers... neither the fact that someone changed the channel of the TV one hour later and the 6 people who were trying to follow the film had to suddenly face a dark version of Baywatch.

But we survived, and in the Helsinki harbor there were Kylli, Susana and Volker, so we did a lot of hugs and started again with the “naked! naked!” shouts... till some young drunk bastard heard us and showed us his butt.

Before going to sleep Birgit tried to shave me, but, to make it short, I was locked in the toilet and it took me some time to get out.

10. The end of the world as we know it

And, talking about scary stuff, we also did some promotion for one of our sponsors, and we gave a lot of magazines and brochures away. I hate marketing and I have always avoided this kind of work even for money, but I felt in debt with the organizers of the TSU so I was ready to do whatever they asked for.

Anyway, I couldn’t believe being in a country famous for being so ecologically respectful, and feeling resposible for such a waste of paper! But well, at least I was not wearing a big blue hat neither a black garbage bag!

We did our best, and people reacted in diffierent ways:

a) some accepted the papers without saying anything (and we used to abuse from them giving them 10 copies of the same shit)

b) some strange guys even said “thanks!” (20 copies for them!)

c) some said “NO!” like a catholic nun when her priest propose doing it with condom.

d) some didn’t talk and moved around us like doing slalom.

e) some insulted us in Finnish, I think.

And don’t tell the sponsors, but sooner or later everybody realized that the most practical thing was to use the garbage bins. I really regret not finding any container speciallized in paper, but the actual moral dylema was this one:

“is it more ethically reprobable to trow this shit to the garbage or to keep annoying people on the street?”

Michal and me spent some time watching the tamed cats tricks, we took another look at the harbor market, and we visited the Orthodox Church (quite nice).

We met the group for lunch at Unicafe but spread again afterwards. Marika guided some of us to the best cakes place, and later we went for a walk next to the sea, around the Market Hall, the Bungee Jumping Thing, and a nice and green park next to the rich neighbourhood.

By the way, in Spain we usually explain the rich neighbourhoods like this:

“this is the rich neighborhood: people who lives here have big cars”

In Finland, it goes like this:

“this is the rich neighborhood: people who lives here have helicopters”

Bloody rich bastards!

We also went to Forum (a shopping center, a little bit different than the one in Barcelona) and I bought a CD by CMX called “Aura” (aka: the Monkey CD). I’m listening to it while writing this shit.

And then it was time for Finnish baseball, but I also escaped from it, and just took siesta, shower and sauna (“the 3 relaxing S”)...

Few of us really liked the sauna at first sight, but at that time I think it had arrived the moment when almost everybody had learned to enjoy those woden places and the great feeling of sweating and getting tired without doing sport, and we were starting to understand why Finns have one sauna for every 3 persons (as they proudly say: “more saunas than cars!”... and as some smartass noticed: “more saunas than showers!”).

After that I felt so relaxed, that I even let Birgit (aka: the Hairdresser Punk) shave my beard with Paolo’s machine.

I liked my beard, and I’m too lazy to shave, but actually I couldn’t resist the presure from the shaving fanathics: “Xavi, shave or lose”, “make shave not war”, “shave the ocean”...

But, when shaved, some others told me I looked even worse without beard... (the grass is always greener, eh?) and my success with girls didn’t increase too much.

Anyway, the party that night was great, in a great party place with quite cheap beer, some wine thanks to Alessio, and 3 different atmospheres:

a) Finnish cinema (Kaurismaki)

b) V.I.P. dancing floor with lots of slow songs and hippie stuff

c) sauna

of course I was in the b one! I love cinema, and Kaurismaki is very good, but not enough for a TSU! So in the little VIP room we drunk quite a lot and danced and also took a quick look at the sauna (sorry, Susana!). It was really cool, but also a little bit sad because we had to say goodbye to Marika and some others.

But things cannot last forever, and the next station was San Petersburg (aka: Petrograd, aka: Leningrad), in Russia, and someway we knew it wasn’t going to be exactly like Finland...

The bus leaved next morning and stopped for an early lunch (12:00 a.m) at Hamina (aka: the Rampart Road), where there is an Orthodox Church, an Aladin’s House, a tower and stuff like that, but the town’s hit is a Camping Tent (one of the biggest in Europe). And, yes, it was very big, indeed.

And suddenly, we arrived at the Russian border.

We had to show our passports to a lot of soldiers and burocrats and get in and out of the bus. The first guardians were Finnish and they didn’t looked very worried about us leaving the country, but the Russians weren’t so sure about letting us in.

The first of them (still Finnish) had a very boring life and tried to have fun saying some clever reference to each of our countries, like: “mmmhh... Estevao from Brazil... mmmhh... Brazil... Pelé!”, etcetera.

But he didn’t joke when he saw Soula’s passport! He looked at it, then looked at her face a couple of long seconds, then stared at the passport picture again, then looked at her eyes again... and finally, after checking her face and her picture several times, concluded: “mmmhh... very beautiful!”

And we thought the big Russian female guardian was going to say something nice to Milos too, because she spent half an hour doing research about his fake passport, but she was too shy and all she did to break the ice was to let him enter the country without having a proper visa.

Someone wrote in the “travelling tricks” section of her mental notebook: “Whatever choises you make in life, never chose Milos’ queue”...

But frontiers and borders are quite stupid places: they only create problems and confussion... For example, there were 2 lines, one for “nothing to declare” and one for “goods to declare”, and everybody was in the first one except a confused girl who was in the second one, so a confused guy tried to be funny to her and said: “Hey, are you a good to declare?”, but she didn’t understand and said: “Sorry?”. He insisted: “Are you a good to declare?” and she smiled and said: “Thank you very much, you are so kind!”

And it took us so much time that we were even thinking of just starting to run all together to Russia, I’m sure that the soldiers couldn’t have shot all of us fast enough! And, as an extra protection, someone proposed to to do it wife-carrying.

But finally we did it the oficial way, even if we had to wrote in different places our names and first names and surnames and family names and given names and patronimic names and didn’t know exactly what was what... “it’s far more difficult than it seems!”.

(For Russians its easier because they know the tricks and they have easy names, and because for example the wife of Putin gets called Putina, despite it sounds really funny in Spanish)

When we came into the bus again we could hear the song “Shiny Happy People” from a tape hits by R.E.M. (aka: Rem), and it was almost as appropiate as some minutes ago, just before getting out of the bus and starting all the border procedures, when destiny wanted us to hear “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”...

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we had left the European Union behind...

We were in Russia...

All of us!

11. Ducks, fleas and bacteries

Just because Finns had also told a lot of impolite jokes making fun of themselves, we thought it was fair that they also told us a couple of jokes about their Eastern neighbors. Even if some of those jokes sounded so terrible as this one:

“What’s something that doesn’t vibrate and doesn’t fit into an ass?”

“A Russian anal vibrator!”

But the fact is that you could notice the change of country just from looking at the pavement of the road...

And, at the side of it, instead of that cute yellow signs with reindeers or mooses that tourists liked to steal in Finland, there were farmers selling fruits every here and there, and also young girls with short skirts, hitch-hiking or selling their bodies (“we will never know”).

We tried to forget the Finnish toilets with their lovely little showers and we accepted the fact that since that very same moment we could consider ourselves lucky if we had some little piece of paper to clean ourselves.

And, despite the rumors, in St. Petersburg there was hot tap water... but it was not drinkable... or was it? Actually, there were almost as many attitudes towards the tap water as people:

a) some people (mostly Russians) said there was no problem at all, they had been drinking it all their life and they were feeling fine,

b) some said that travelers guides advise to drink bottled water just in case, but they tried to behave like normal people,

c) some were even avoiding salads and soups, as tap water bacteries could be hiding everywhere... but at least they dared to clean their teeth every night,

d) some others only brushed their teeth with vichy water

(actually, I also tried the d option the first night and it was cool, and when I’ll be rich I plan to brush my teeth with champagne every night)

The sleeping place at first sight seemed better than Finnish floors: it was in a big Russian gym, with a couple of red commie flags with the hammer and the harvest tool, and also a little banner for Stalinist demonstrations. And the floor was soft, thanks to a huge tatami with the colors of the Aegee flag! (“I guess that’s why they chose this place”).

And there were enough showers to not having to queue for them (actually there were only 3 showers for boys, but they looked so much like mushrooms farms that most people decided to avoid showers till the end of the TSU, so most of time there were no queues at all).

The plugs, that was interesting, were not next to the floor, but next to the high roof... you had to climb into gymnastics wooden bars to try to plug your mobile (as several of our experts in architecture noticed: “someone must have looked at the plans upside down while building this thing...”)

And there was a mosquito’s nest downstairs (but either the Russian mosquitoes were weak compared to the Finnish ones, or I was already used to mosquito bitings, because my skin didn’t get so many disgusting colors as in the cottage, only several dozens of pink spots), and there were some strong Russians training around, and a mysterious lady (who looked like those stereotypical old ladies who spy the guests and tell all the gossips to the KGB)... and in a couple of days also some fleas joined the party (aka: little jumping bastards).

And one day, while going to the shower, I also crossed in my way with 2 tall guys in smart suits and ties that stared at me, my underwear and my towel, like asking me what the fuck was I doing there. I could have asked the same to them, but probably they wouldn’t have understood English.

In this, Russia is like Spain: not even the people in museums speak English, and the language of Shakespeare is almost only spoken by Aegee members and matriushka sellers (it seems that during the Cold War it wasn’t a very fashionable language...)

Anyway, the Russian organizers were so sweet, and San Petersburg (aka: just Petersburg, aka: just Peter) was so amazing that even if there had been crocodiles in the tatami it would have been worthwhile!

In that city, not only the typical postcard buildings were majestic, but also all the others!

Just arrived I joined the Finns and the Russian organizers for a short preview sightseeing around.

In the Tvrichesky Park we saw an example of the strong Russian soul: an elder drunk man jumped into the cold and dirty lake and pretended to swim with all his clothes on...

But that was not the only thing that impressed us...

In fact, that was totally the opposite style of sightseeing than in Turku (where the guide told us 100 details of even normal houses), because there were so many beautiful buildings and palaces all around that most of them were not famous and didn’t have names, so the Russian girls were stressed with milions of questions difficult to answer:

“What’s that? what’s that? what's that? what’s that? ...and that?”

“Well... a beautiful building... another beautiful building... another building... a palace... another palace... another palace... another palace”

Just in case those questions weren’t difficult enough, they were also asked:

“What do Russian people think of the changes that happened to the country since the Tsar times, with the Revolution, the Proletarian Dictatorship, the Cold War, the Perestroika... till nowadays?”

But the answer was quite clear (those lovely mother ducks were ready for that and even for more!), and it included this aphorism:

“There’s still a lot of people who would like to come back to Communism, but most of them can be classified in those 2 groups:

a) those old ones that lived alright under the Communism and afterwars they became poor and cannot live so well,

b) those young ones who have no idea of what are they talking about.”

We met the group, we had dinner in a Pizza Place (and almost started another revolution for this!) and we did more dark sightseeing around the River Neva and some channels that tourists like to call “Other River Neva”.

The light of the beautiful houses and palaces reflecting on the water was something to remember.

And most people were scared to death of someone stealing their bags, money and passports, and were hugging the bags like little babies, but I think the real danger was crossing the streets.

In Finland you could cross even with red light, because all drivers will stop, very respectfully...

In Russia, even if you cross with the green light, you better look twice in both directions and run for your life like a scared chicken!

Another thing that scared some of us a little bit was the possibility of getting lost, so we invented the Mother Duck Technique: we chose the Russian girl who looked more oriented, we called her Mother Duck, and we behaved like tiny little ducks following her around, very carefully...

And we were scared of getting lost because:

a) the banners are in the Cyrillic alphabet (for example PEPSI had become something like HEHCI, and it was normal for Russians, but the tourists were taking pictures even of McDonalds’ advertisements),

b) the names of the places have been changed quite often (almost everytime they changed the government),

c) not many people speak English...

and specially because:

d) in Russia the cities are big, the country itself is big, the buildings are big, the blocks are big, the roads are big, the squares are big, the rivers are big, the bridges are big, etcetera.

(Once I tried to go for a walk alone and Niklas offered me a map. “I don’t need that! I plan to be here in less than an hour, so I will just walk around this block...”

anyway I got distracted and it started raining again half an hour later, so just managed to turn the first corner).

12. Choosing between Life and Beauty

But that first night we went together to the Dormitory (aka: Ninja Room), Standa did his reindeer call (aka: goodnight burping sounds), and then some people tried to sleep while others did a snoring contest that sounded like if there were also some lions trapped inside.

We had breakfast in the Sauna-looking Room, next to the green swimming pool, we received some lectures in the Mosquito Nest Room: lessons about Russian history, about Russ-Finnish relationships, and about the Russian alphabet (and all I remember is that they have a letter called Cher, like the singer; another one called something like “shht!” that people didn’t know if it was a real letter or if the teacher was trying ton tell us to shut up... despite she was really polite and when we were too noisy for the lesson, she actually just said “I’m sorry to interrupt you”...)

And I also remember something like “this sentence can be said like this or like this, when you talk with someone like you, use this one; when you talk with grown ups the other one”

And then... The Magic History of Finland and Russia According to Children!

Did somebody recorded that? It could have been a great movie, Dogma style!

There was King Alexander I, there was Nikolai II, there was Napoleon and Stalin and Hitler (“hello, I’m the Fuhrer, I’m from AEGEE-Berlin, and I plan to stay here for some time...”),... and, when they run out of celebrities, the others had to be cannons and ships and “The people”. When I saw all the paper adrezzo I expected the worst, but it was real fun.

And I had the honor of being Lenin, with a paper beard, an AIDS lace that was supposed to symbolize Revolution, and my most arrogant look... but didn’t understood my exact role in the History (“all I wanted to do was to kill rich bastards...”)

And we went sightseeing again: the Tavricheski Park; the Summer Garden; The Mikhailosky / Engineering Palace (aka: The Palace of that King who was afraid of being killed and of course at the end he was killed, but before he did big parties “in beautiful rooms with beautiful music and beautiful fountains of beautiful vodka and ... girls”); and we saw the University and some other beautiful buildings and gardens without known name (at least for me)...

But let me get serious for a minute:

During World War II, the Nazi Army tried to get Leningrad (aka: Petrograd, aka: St.Petersburg), but it was too cold for them to fight, so they just sieged the city and expected the inhabitants to die of cold and hunger. They didn’t succeed 100%, but maybe that siege was one of the most disgusting horrors of all times.

It was so cold and the shortage of food so horrible that people were eating their own pets and burning their own books and furniture to warm up.

There were thousands of deaths.

And, in the middle of that, there were always volunteers to protect those gardens and palaces all around...

Can you believe that the city managed to keep a lot of monuments like new, and the huge trees of the Summer Garden were not burn to ashes by people who were freezing to death and wanted to burn whatever they could?

To have to decide between die of cold or burning your beautiful gardens must be a tough choice, and deciding between helping your neighbors cut the branches or preventing them from touching the trees, also.

But the Leningrad people had to take those choices... and the trees are still there, like they were there in the Pushkin times. The fucking siege killed lots of people, but couldn’t destroy the beauty of the city.

The implications of this story are creepy and beautiful at the same time, and if you think of those things while walking between those trees, you may see them in a really different way.

Also, it’s nice to think that they are the same trees Pushkin walked around and wrote about in his poems... and Dostoievski in his novels... and Nabokov... and Gogol... and Tolstoi...

We had a red soup (and when I say red soup I’m not talking about politics, I mean the color) for lunch and we visited the Peter and Paul Fortress in the Rabbit Island (aka: the Very First Building of the City), where some people visited the church, while others went around the panorama wall and the beach... well, they called it beach but it was few rocks with 6 oldies in swimming suit. Those oldies didn’t look very well in their shorts or bikinis, but they had seen the disasters of Communism and the disasters of Capitalism, so they were tough enough even to swim in the polluted Neva River.

Later, some people went home, some others went shopping and others we just took a walk in the center.

When the storm started, we run to a bus, went home, took a shower and went to a Latino Party in a disco where latinos had free entrance (interesting fact: neither Spaniards nor Italians were considered latino enough!).

We had some food (Mexican rice and Mexican burger for me), and we danced a little bit between the dancing experts that were impressing us with their movements but were so disgustingly sweated that when one of them touched my arm I almost wanted to cut it off!

(And usually I don’t like dancing salsa... that night I liked it.)

We then slept a little bit and went by trolleybus to the Hermitage (aka: Winter Palace).

But there was a queue in the entrance, and the queue –as everything else in Russia- was huge (the Hermitage was not only one of the greatest cultural hits of our trip, but also one of the greatest cultural hits of the world).

First we stayed at the end of the line, like civilized people, but then someone informed us that a couple of our fast girls had arrived earlier, so we advanced some meters to stay with them... and we were arriving one by one and all of us wanted to skip an hour of queue... so some of the visitors that were behind our 2 girls started complaining. One of them asked me: “how many people from your group who arrive late is going to pass in front of us?” and I didn’t know what to say, as we were only 6 at that time and maybe 20 more were going to join us... so I just tried my friendly smile and confessed “uf, a lot!”. They started bitching between them (they were Catalans and they thought nobody could understand their little language) so I guessed a little fight was going to start... but then someone realized that there had been some lovely organizer queuing for us since first hour of the morning, so we could skip some more hours of queue!

I was so happy that I even said bye to the angry Catalans. They were not the only “queue losers” (aka: QL) staring at us with killer eyes, so some participants were really ashamed of being so impolite, while others showed the Aegee card to the QL like policemen showing the plaques in a crime scene, and others did very rude things with the arms and fingers... And one QL even shouted something in a foreigner language that sounded really really bad.

I think that day we destroyed the stereotype that only civilized people visit museums... And we also did some tricky stuff with our student cards to pay less than it would have been fair.

Then we arranged a meeting point and I got happily lost like in Tallinn.

And that museum was... yes... HUGE.

About 3.000.000 monuments of culture and art of the European and Oriental peoples, from antiquity to nowadays (and I don’t joke with the number! I copied it from a booklet!)...

Those treasures included: pictures, graphic sheets, sculptures, applied art items (aka: jars and stuff), coins, medals, stones, clocks, mummies...

There was a map with a route to follow, but I didn’t have time enough to check a piece of paper, so just wandered around those magnificent and gigantic rooms... there’s the little possibility that I missed something... but I opened my eyes like oranges and I saw stuff by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Matisse... And the building itself was amazing (it used to be residence and party place of the tsars). I had already seen it in the cinema, in the film “The Russian Arc” (a boring but breathtaking technical masterpiece like “2001”... I recommend it to everybody) and I went to see it again when I came back.

But seeing it real you feel quite a different atmosphere... no waltz music, for example.

Some rooms were really quiet (the ones with Chinese carpets, for example), others were really crowded and noisy (hundreds of smartasses saying to each other “oh! Picasso! oh! Picasso!”), others were quite weird (like the Clocks’ Room), and in the underground floor there was even a death horse.

When the meeting time arrived I was totally lost and had to run from one huge room to another, looking for the exit and looking like if I had stolen something.

13. The most sensitive spot of yours

We ate it in the University Area (some people didn’t wanted to miss anything in the Hermitage, so they did even miss the lunch and joined us later, but most of us liked art but also liked food, even with the risk that it may had been cooked with tap water instead of vichy), and it was very cheap and not very bad: red water, clear soup, chicken legs covered with melted cheese, and french fries (the interesting thing was that the french fries, instead of being next to the cheesy chicken, they were inside the soup! quite confusing, but I loved the cheesy chicken anyway)... and someone mistaked the clean forks with the dirty ones (“ups”).

Some part of my body was irritated after so much walking (don’t ask me which one), but the show must go on, so we climbed the stairs of St. Isaak’s Cathedral, another greatest hit. Not only the Cathedral itself was amazing (it’s an impressing construction by someone called Montferrant, graced with 112 solid granite columns of 114 tons each, and about 400 relieves and bronze sculptures), but also the view was great... Climbing high places is always nice, even if all you can see from above is the roofs of cute little houses... but St. Petersburg is far more than cute little houses!:

We had a magnificent birdview of the Kazan Cathedral, the Neva River, the channels, the bridges, the Hermitage, the 10.000 palaces, the gardens, The Church of the Resurrection of Christ (aka: The Greatest Postcard Hit, aka: Our Savior-on-the-Spilt-Blood, aka: more or less like Moscow’s St.Basils’)...

By the way, some of our art experts defined this last one like: “that green and white building and other colors...” and it was quite a shiny lovely church, with big colorful “onions” or “ice-creams”, everybody had his own eatable metaphors when talking about Orthodox buildings, but everybody liked it without exception.

Then there was shopping time, and I just went up and down the Nevski Prospect. When we met again, people had bought funny Russian hats and several matrushkas.

“I wonder why are we famous for this!”, said one of our lovely ducks.

Matrushkas, or however you write it, are the traditional Russian dolls: woman-shaped wooden boxes (not exactly like the woman-shaped bottles of cola but with the same spirit) that contain other woman-shaped wooden boxes, than contain other woman-shaped wooden boxes... etcetera till a very tiny one that doesn’t contain anything.

In the old times, they were painted like cute dolls with a traditional dress... nowadays you can find them painted with all sorts of characters, from Walt Disney cartoons to the CCCP big bosses.

Actually I even saw some really creepy ones with the faces of Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein... and some others inside that I didn’t recognize and didn’t dare to ask.

Those dolls have some kind of magic... and maybe this magic is the only thing in the world that can put so close to each other and in the same level the presidents of the U.S.A, the international terrorists, the Soviet leaders, Harry Potter, John Lennon, the Ayatollah and Winney the Poo...

Those souvenir guys were great, they speak dozens of languages and they also manage to sell a lot of little glorious heads of Lenin (plastic ones, but painted like glorious metal)... and sometimes also glorious Stalin heads... and once I also saw a Putin one! (“enough is enough! shame on the tourists!”)

And, talking about folklore, we had dinner in a Russian Restaurant. So far we had been eating American-Italian dinners, Mexican dinners... and Chinese was also in the program, but the organizers received a lot of pressure to feed us with the local cuisine, like if the fried potatoes sailing in a soup hadn’t been interesting enough, so we went to that place with stuffed bears and fake trees and a lot of things for tourists hanging from the walls. And it was a buffet restaurant (aka: eat-as-much-as-you-can-and-taste-strange-stuff restaurant)...

A clever option in buffets is to get the food that you like... a funny option in buffets is to get all the strange things and enjoy tasting the stuff from other cultures and surprising your tongue with new textures and feelings...

Of course I’m talking about the jelly cubes! Maybe it wasn’t nice to play with the food, but at that moment I thought that it was the food who was playing with us! Those jelly things vibrated around and jumped from here to there and if you listened to them carefully they even whispered “come on... be brave... eat me...” And I even managed to get the recipe:

1) boil water (from the tap, I guess) with little pieces of meat and fat and a little bit of salt,

2) put the boiled mix in the window in the middle of a Russian Winter,

3) cut the resulting jelly in perfect cubes,

4) enjoy!

(In a world that gets more and more homogeneous everyday, where everybody talks the same and listens the same music and wears similar clothes, I like to find in the gastronomy the last little differences between cultures and countries... And, as some of us were surprised by the jelly-thing, some others were surprised because sardines had eyes, and most of people will never understand that in France and Spain we eat snails)

There was also some sauce you could build a house with, and a lot of vegetables, and some normal food... but the cubes got the hypnotizing power of Pamela Anderson tits (“wait a minute... maybe...”)

Anyway, where were Soula and Nuria????!!!!

And now, ladies and gentlemen... it’s time for a Gym Party!

There wasn’t much music (only 5 CDs, most of them Finnish... and most of the people couldn’t stand again my CD of Leonard Cohen) and there wasn’t many party atmosphere, but the company was nice and we had some cheap alcohol... Toby’s t-shirt knew the lemma: “VODKA: Connecting People”

But then the semi-drunk basket match started and it seemed dangerous!

And I know it may break the rhythm of the story, but I’m going to copy here a whole chapter of a Russian book we found in a bus. It’s a conversation guide with the intention to teach English sentences to the Russian travelers. In the front cover, under the title in purple and pink, there’s a picture of those English guards with high black helmets, and a smiley Queen Elisabeth... The book was printed in 2002, and most chapters talk about “how to ask for directions” or “how to order food in restaurants”... but I’m going to copy the Love Chapter, which goes like this (Cyrillic phonetic transcription omitted to make it shorter):

“Do you love me (still)?”, “I love you”, “It seems to me (that) you don't love me any more”, “Forgive me but I hate you!”, “You are so beautiful (today)!”, “May I kiss you?”, “You can!/ You can kiss me!”, “Your lips are nice!”, “I like to look at you!”, “May I embrace you?”, “You are welcome but not too tight...”, “Your hair smells very well! I like it!”, “Will you marry me?”, “I want to marry you”, “Have you been married?”, “Of course, darling!”, “I am divorced”, “I’m a bachelor”, “I’m single”, “I’m a widower”, “I’m a widow”, “Go away! You stink!”, “It’s high time to go to bed/ Let’s go to bed!”, “Let’s switch off the light(s)!”, “Let me help you to undress!”, “Don’t be inhibited! I’m eager to see you naked!”, “For pity’s sake don’t be afraid!”, “I’m fond of long foreplay!”, “I’m shy”, “What kind of sex do you like?”, “I prefer tender... lovemaking”, “Where is the most sensitive spot of yours?”, “Are the breasts, hips, buttocks or something else?”, “You are crazy! You drive me wild!”, “I’ll become pregnant/ You’ll make me pregnant”, “And what about contraceptives?”, “Don’t bother!”, “I say! I want to have your baby!”

Oh, yeah! Not even Aleksandr Sergueievich Pushkin could have expressed intercourse in a more kinky and poetic way!

Toby’s international conversation guide with drawings instead of words was also quite fun, but you cannot talk about “tender lovemaking” with that...

I say!!! I want to have your baby!

14. When the bridges go up

We woke up next morning and took a bus to Peterhof Town, to visit the Peterhof Garden.

As you may guess, the Garden of Peterhof is... a huge huge garden. Long and wide paths, gigantic fountains, some forests, some ducks, a lot of water and several golden statues.

The golden turtles look at the sky and throw water from the mouth, a golden Samson is fighting a golden monster who throws water from the mouth, chubby golden angels throw water from their mouths... etcetera. Russia looks really rich when you look at those kind of things. (Quite a contrast compared with the Garden of the Fem-President in Naantali...)

I also got lost there, but this time was not like in the Hermitage, and I only enjoyed it the first 20 minutes... then I started missing people.

Finally I found a nice Russian girl who showed me the Funny Fountain (aka: the one that was not golden) and explained me why was it funny:

“Well, there is a magic path with big stones and people walk on it and maybe nothing happens... but if they step on the “magic stone”, the fountain throws water to them.”

There was also a green wall with a little window and behind it there was the little man whose mission was to control all the magic of the thing. It must be quite an interesting job, and I guess that pretty girls in white t-shirts were more likely to step on magic stones than the ugly ones.

I tried... and I didn’t get wet.

There was also several weddings around (I hadn’t told about them before, but there were weddings everywhere we went! I don’t know if it’s because everybody get married a lot of times in the North, or because the summers are short so everybody was marrying those days), and I was told that in Russia people use to shout “bitter! bitter! bitter! bitter!” till the brand new husband and the brand new wife kiss each other, so the bitterness becomes “sweeeeeeeet”... (more or less like our “naked” shouts).

The police tried to arrest Milos (aka: The Alpha Male, aka: Mushroom Writer), for sleeping on the grass, but he escaped; and I lost my pullover, but Vero found it!

And we had a picnic next to... a... grave? and came back, siesta, shower, and dinner in another Russian buffet. It was not so “traditional” as the previous one, as we found more occidental food and the price was 5 y.e.

(That was also interesting... What’s an y.e.?, you may ask. Well, an y.e. is an “euro equivalent” and it’s equal to one euro, but it is not an euro... Almost as confusing as the Finnish superexpensive eurocents.)

And talking about confusing stuff, they also had vegetarian jelly cubes with peas instead of meat!

We headed to an English Fucking Pub and people sat to watch TV... come on! there weren’t even the Simpsons! Just the Opening Ceremony of the Athens Olympic Games! I had some beers, one of them broke up mysteriously, took a look at the dancing floor (interesting... 80s disco music and some guys dancing in roller blades) and managed to convince Greece to go for a walk even under the rain. Romantic walk, let’s say, next to the Neva and the Statue of The Bronze Horseman (aka: Peter the Great).

Then met the group again, and went to see the bridges going up.

Cause there are some hours at night when the bridges are up in St.Petersburg, then the boats can go up and down the river, but cars and people can not cross from one side to the other... that’s even worse than when the metro closes in Barcelona! if it gets late and you are in the wrong side of the Neva, the night can get very long...

And it’s quite an impressing spectacle, because –of course- the bridges are not little bridges but big and heavy roads with their white lines and their fences and their lamps and their wires for the trams. And they go up slow but without pauses till the solid road you had been walking during the daytime and you are used to see horizontal, is now totally vertical... There are no words to explain the strange feeling you get watching it with some beer in your veins. It looks like the floor is on your side are you are floating somewhere.

And, still confused, we went next to a monument to some other Russian hero (maybe Peter again?), and we were given diplomas for having survived the cottage (after so many hours surviving Russia we had almost forgotten that!), Anna made a “thanks speech”, we shouted “naked! naked!”, and then we sang Bohemian Rhapsody.

And we went to see also the Eternal Fire of the Victims of WWII.

There were some neo-hippies around, some of them stoned I guess, and one of them had a guitar. They sang some Russian unplugged folk-rock and maybe I was still confused by the vertical road, but I loved the atmosphere and thought that was another one of the magic moments of the trip.

We managed to get into private taxis (4 or 5 people on each, plus the driver) and we went to sleep a little bit on the tatami thing. Some were lucky and got big taxis, but my group got into a quite small one... to compensate its little size, the noise of its engine sounded exactly like an airplane.

But let me tell you more about those taxis:

There are public taxis in Russia, but they are for losers. If you want to get “a taxi”, you just call any car in the street and most of them will stop (almost all of them), then you tell the driver where you want to go, you arrange a price with him, and you get into the car. No taxi lights, no price-counting machines, no licenses, no rules...

Let me insert here Stefan’s Taxi Story. He manages to express the sinister feeling of us poor chicken-tourists better than Stephen King could try to do:

“It was that night (...) when I found myself pressed tightly into the backseat of a small car together with four girls of our Aegee group. We were doing about 90km/h (speed limit was about 50) racing through the slightly scaring scenery of a huge and dark St. Petersburg. While I was rather tired and sleepy, the girls were obviously not. Three of them, all participants, started questioning our 'mother duck' who was sitting in front next to the Russian driver:

'How do you know this is a taxi actually?'

Mother duck (our nickname for all Russian organizers without whom we would have been lost in no time in this big big city) didn’t have a clue what they were talking about and stated the obvious:

'Because it stopped when we gave it the signal, of course.'

'Yes ok, but it doesn’t have a taxi sign on the roof or anything, you know?'

It was true. I had been wondering about this myself so I started to listen a bit more carefully.

'Yes, that's because it's not one of the official taxis. Those have taxi signs and everything.'

'So this guy is doing something completely different during the day time?'

They had started to speak directly about the slightly strange looking guy in front of the tiny car as if he was non-existent. I just hoped he didn't speak any English at all.

'Yes, I guess so.'

'So he could be.. he could be about anything, right?'

What followed was half a minute of silence which said more than thousand words nevertheless. Some girls started to shift uncomfortably, glancing worried looks at the silent man who was driving much too fast. The fact that we didn't know St. Petersburg and thus didn't know where we were going in the dead of the night didn't do any good to raise the mood.

'Just speak it out loudly: Yes, he could be a maniac and mass murderer who's going to kill us all!' one of the Polish and less intimidated girls replied with a hardly visible smile on her face.

Uh-oh. Now I really hoped the poor guy couldn't understand what we were saying. I tried to save the day:

'Well if he really is, I will sacrifice myself to gain you some time. So you can run for it and escape, ok?'

Unfortunately none of the girls seemed too impressed by my generous offer but shortly after that we finally arrived in front of our lodging place.

We got out of the car quickly, and Mr. Taxi Driver raced off into the night again without any further comment.”

Quite impressing, uh? I’m glad to say that all our taxi stories got happy ends like this one... well... just a minute... where is Alexandra?

15. Revolution Boat

I had been in Moscow some years ago (my first SU!), and I remember it totally crowded by Lenin statues and Communist regalia. They also have the original stuffed Lenin, that looks almost as alive as a Halloween pumpkin.

It seemed to me that Moscow had decided that Stalin was an asshole, but Lenin was a nice guy.

Petersburg was not so sure about Lenin neither. I didn’t talk with many natives about it, but the density of Lenin statues per square kilometer was really low compared to Moscow. You could find him, of course, and you could also find Marx and Engels, but most of the time you could walk around and think that there had been no Soviet Times at all...

It’s not that the city looks too modern... is that the general feeling is still like from the XVIII Century and the Tsars.

And the local hero, if they have one besides their beloved Pushkin, is probably Peter the Great.

I guess Mr. Peter was not an angel himself, but he had traveled around Europe and wanted to build a majestic brand new city to impress the tourists. He wanted something special and cool, like Venice or Amsterdam, so, despite the place was not the best one (terrible winters, terrible floods...) he insisted in building beautiful channels, and it didn’t matter the amount of soldiers and peasants that were going to die in the process...

And he succeed. It was 3 centuries ago, and now the tsars are even more death that Lenin, but their buildings and gardens looked cool and they are still there, like if nothing happened since 1700.

Nevertheless, Petersburg doesn’t forget anything, and it keeps the Aurora Boat (aka: Revolution Boat), a grey battleship from the Russian Navy put on eternal mooring... This ship is supposed to be the one that shot the first cannons of the Proletarian Revolution, the boom-boom noises that the oppressed masses were waiting to start moving their asses and killing rich bastards!

And there’s a little museum inside the Aurora that talks not only about revolutions, but also about the Navy life, and the boat activities in the Russo-Japanese War and the World War II.

And, with that little rain and the right company, it was also far more romantic that it may seem in the postcards.

But the little rain turned into quite a storm and we run away till a yellow and red Russian Fast Food. We sat on its yellow and red chairs and ate soup with meat and cream (aka: Russian escudella) and then huge crockets that looked like normal huge crockets from outside, but when you tried to bite or cut them you realized that inside there was:

a) 50% of warm air

b) 20% of hot oil (dangerous stuff)

c) 25% of meat

d) 5% of melted cheese

The numbers are aprox., and the meat in my crocket was a little bit raw, but I liked the soup and took 2 or 3 dishes... and exploring the crockets was almost as fun as eating them.

We had some free time and some of us went to buy CDs, cause buying CDs in Russia is also special.

You can also find legal and illegal CDs in most countries, but usually the illegal ones are sold in the street and the legal ones inside shops, and you can easy tell the difference from the prize or the recording quality!

In Russia, all the CD shops sell them cheaper than the guys on the streets in other countries, and the quality is higher and they give you tickets like if the CDs are legal... but the CDs have some strange characteristics:

a) Several classics like With the Beatles and Revolver are 2 different LPs in most countries, but turn into only one CD in Russia.

c) the compilations are huge, usually from 20 to 40 songs; and normal new CDs usually include some hits from previous LPs of the same artist...

And

d) sometimes, next to the normal logo, there’s written “Balalaika Records”...

So I went home with lots of songs by the Leonard Cohen, Beck, Tarantino Soundtracks and Tom Waits... with a clean conscience and for the prize of a Finnish bear.

We run under rain a little bit more and later we went for a cruise around the Neva and the channels... very very beautiful, another style of Love Boat thing... if the landscape and the sailing feeling and the after-rain freshness weren’t enough, the organizers produced some bottles of champagne and boxes of chocolates to celebrate we were leaving soon.

We had dinner in a stylish fast food restaurant, stroganoff beef for me (thanks to a very clever suggestion), and Baltika beer, and queued some hours for the toilet. There were a lot of nuns around, and they took their time ordering the food, but they were even worse when going into toilet! I wished I hadn’t drank the beer!

And then the Last Party started with lots of chips and candies and chocolates and alcohol, and the Popularity Contest, in which Estevao ruled... we almost voted him even for the Queen of the SU!

Just joking... The Other Half of the Best Couple was Isia, the Queen was Alice, the Person We Wanted to See Again was Milos, Best Photographer was Gergo, Best Beer Companion was Standa, Best Smile was Linda, etcetera.

And we started drinking and playing strange games, and the party spread around, creating different atmospheres in different rooms:

a) the Ice-Breaking Games Room (previously known as Mosquitos’ Nest) was the most confusing, specially for Anton, who sat in the middle of a circle and tried to guess what the fuck was going on... or for the ones that sat infront of each other and pressed with the knees trying to guess the goal of the game... or the people who kissed and bitted special parts of the body of the person in their left side... by the way, Alex kissed my feet... “yeah, babe, I won’t forget...”

b) in the Chill-Out Room (previously known as Breakfast Room) people sat around the table, drunk without control and talk about life and checked again the results of the Popularity Contest (good laugh when seeing that someone voted for “Xavi and Whoever”...),

c) in the Pool Room people played games in general, I guess,

d) in the Dance Floor Room (previously known as Ice-Breaking Games Room) people were jumping around with Rolling Stones music (really wild 70s party, I loved the atmosphere),

and, talking about “love”... e) in the Love Room (previously known as Basket Course)... well... several weird stuff happened, and people used to go there 2 by 2... some of them without waiting the previous 2 to go out...

16. Back to reality

Next morning we spent some time on farewell hugs and kisses, quite a sad thing, and got into the bus... (we were not going directly to Barcelona... as we had bought the cheapest flights of the internet our holidays were not over yet...)

(And from now on, each time is say “we” I mean less and less people, as some had already gone home, some went to Moscow...)

The bus stopped in Vyborg (aka: Viipuri, aka: Bonus Sightseeing), a city that looked like if it had been bombed the previous week. There was an old castle, some medieval dressed guys selling stuff, and a graffiti in a wall that said “God hates as all”.

We wanted to burn our last rubles, but my advice to readers is this:

“if you are ever going out of Russia and you don’t know what to do with your last coins... better give them to anyone for free than buying bottles which labels you cannot read”...

After some time trying to swallow the mineral water I bought, someone told me it actually was some kind of medicine that would “cure” my pancreas, intestine, colon... Maybe that was the reason why it tasted like crap...

In the frontier, similar procedure than getting in. But the first filter was made by a soldier like this:

“Where are you from?”, he said after getting inside the bus with his little gun.

“Around the world”, we answered.

“Any Russian?”, he said.

“No”

“Ukrainians?”

“No”

“OK, you can pass”

When we finally arrived to Helsinki again, we had a pizza and slept a little bit in the floor of the party place in the Red Light District (that looked very save compared to other places we had seen), and in the morning we had more goodbyes and left to Tampere, where we had more goodbyes and more pizza (and we did 100 tricks to avoid paying extra money for our extra weigh... and we saw that in the souvenir shop they were trying to sell 3 eurocents for the price of 5 euros... “no wonder why those Finns are so rich!”), and some hours later we left to London, where we slept in the floor again, but that time with thousands of homeless users of Easyjet... (interesting place also, that Heatrow Airport at those hours, but we were so tired that we even managed to sleep), and hugged goodbye again and finally left to Barcelona, where we hugged good-bye and left each one to his house... to eat and sleep a little bit more.

And I think that’s all.

At least it’s all I can remember.

17. Disclaimer and acknowledgements

You can blame me for this shit, but also you can blame a little bit all those nice friends who kindly helped me taking notes (Anna, Marcos, Stefan...), answering my difficult questions about facts, names and translations (Michal, Alice...), and correcting my mistakes (Susana, Anni...), and I guess it will still need several corrections, so feel free to send them, specially about spellings! (fucking spellings! I hate those crazy rules! I hate this crazy language!)

But keep in mind I’m not a journalist, I’m just an engineer with some imagination, and this is not serious stuff, it’s just bullshit inspired in actual facts.

I also stole a lot of jokes from Marcos, Stefan, Estevao, Alex, Soula, Michal, Milos, Petri, Niklas and several other smartarses... and usually I didn’t care for copyrights and I avoided using their names because didn’t know if people would like it or not, so I tryed to keep the image of a big anonimous mass telling bullshit trough 30 lovely mouths... don’t know if I managed.

Thanks to the organizers, there are also some real facts about geography and history in this text, but all the mistakes in this area can be blamed to me... I confess all the History of Russia I knew was Orwell’s “Animal Farm”... and all the History of Finland I knew was... eh... whatever!

And same goes for Sweden and Estonia.

If someone thinks I forgot to write some funny story from the trip, just tell and I’ll try to add it (but keep in mind this webpage is for children, so I don’t write about kinky things).

And if someone doesn’t like some joke (I know I wrote some impolite stuff, but I didn’t want to offend anyone, just tryed to be funny)... tell me and it will be automaaaaatically erased!

And of course we have to thank again to those organizers who did a great job making that trip posible, and to them and to all the participants for being there and creating such an atmosphere. There was so much humor and good vibrations in the air most of the time...

Writing this shit was not so good as being there again, but it was a little bit like that; if someone managed to read it til here, I hope you also enjoyed it as much as me.

And I won’t miss the opportunity to send you a big big kiss from Barcelona.

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