2012_09_28 Vilnius, Lithuania to Bialystok, Poland

The Ecoline bus has a stewardess who fusses with tickets and passports
and even serves coffee, tea, beer and snacks at a price on the double
decker bus from Riga to Vilnius. Brigitte had given me apples from her
yard for my trip; it was coals to Newcastle, apples are everywhere. I
took a bus to the suburbs where my new hosts, Swanus, in software, and
Dalia, an accountant, their three kids, the terrier pup named Balto
(after the Jamaican gold medal winner) and beautiful Himalayan cat
live in a roomy new house with a huge yard. Svanus is still adding
insulation to the two car garage. The girls cheerfully gave up their
bedroom to me and by 8 am the next morning the house was empty save
the animals and me.

Again, trusted with keys, I found the bus stop to the city, shopped
for groceries, socks at a Humana thrift store and Lonely Planet books
on Bali and staying healthy in India. Svanus and Dalia were generous
with their computers - my Kindle Fire is jumpy and limited - and tried
to help me master Picasa web where hundreds of my photos languish.

I found the beauiful Old Town and Cathedral Square but felt lonely at
the two art museums I visited. The tourist season must have passed
with the summer. Svanus told me most Soviet art was destroyed when the
USSR came to an end but one enterprising capitalist gathered up the
sculpture and made a park in a swamp.

It was terrible to learn that 91% of Vilnius' Jewish population was
murdered during the war. Many partisans fighting the Soviet occupation
from the forests died too, awaiting rescue from the West. Young and
dedicated, they lasted an average of 2 1/2 years and their photos,
living and dead, are displayed in the old KGB prison ("Kuhguhbuh").
The display of the declining numbers of the
Jewish ghetto made me wonder how so many could be herded and killed by
the Nazis.

Downstairs were tiny holding cells with no place to sit; cells with
bare bunks and 15 layers of paint on the wall to obliterate the
scrawls of the prisoners. There was an outside exercise yard, a water
torture room, solitary confinement and an execution chamber in a
sub-basement.

Svanus told me his grandfather was deported to Siberia and died there.
Some years ago he and his father travelled there to retrieve his bones
and bury him in Lithuania. He said he had never seen such poverty. Our
deep discussions gave me a sleepless night!

One early evening at the computer I noticed a hot air balloon out the
window and ran outside to see half a dozen drifting and landing
nearby. I found out it was a common sight, but a highlight of my stay.

My next stop was Bialystok, Poland - I like the name (remember Max
Bialystok of "The Producers"?
Teenaged Emilie had seen my couch request and wrote that her mother
Beata (Beti) would like to host me. She met me at the bus station, a
psychotherapist coming from a group therapy session with female cancer
survivors. We drove to her lovely flat in a high-rise on Waszungtona
Street and chatted in English and French as  she  made a lovely
three-cheese salad. She and Emilie are vegetarians. Emilie's pooch
would bound three feet in the air in anticipation of going out. Beti
gave up her cozy bedroom to me, saying, "It's okay!" and "Dobje"
("Good") over the phone.

I walked the dog to nearby palace gardens and along the major
pedestrian street, armed with a map. Emelie returned from her camping
trip with a bad cold but insisted on showing me the palace and two
modern art galleries which left us puzzled. She loves to study
Japanese! Her father lives in Connecticut and I convinced her to drop
the second "C" from that state. She brewed a delicious remedy of warm
milk, garlic and honey. We wanted to tour a primeval forest nearby but
the weather turned bitter cold and I took the train to my next stop,
Warsaw, in a shabby car filled with cycists and bicycles.

How lost and lonely I would have felt in these countries without the
warmth and hospitality of my Couchsurfing hosts!

2012_09_19 Travels to Riga, Latvia

Report from Alexa on 19 September...

I sat on the bus from Tallinn to Riga with a pretty young Finnish medical student who told me the big homes along the road are owned by Russians. more bad news: Tuberculosis is rife among the 'bums' and Riga prostitutes have a high risk of AIDs. She had just had her hair streaked in Estonia, much cheaper than in Finland. Despite her remarks, I found Latvia lovely, only saw a few 'bums' and no hookers. There tend to be pious women begging at the entrance of churches everywhere in Russia and Eastern Europe.

 

At the bus station was my next couch, Zane ("Tzana"), on medical leave following lung surgery from her PR job at a big supermaket chain, which supplies her car and Internet in her large remodeled house in the forest 30 kilometers outside of Riga. She was making up of her mind at age 35 to take time off to travel. She'd loved visiting Viet Nam with her partner (teaching business software in Denmark that week). She would fly to Oslo in a week to visit her best friend and to the States later in the fall, a bargain she couldn't pass up. I begged off exploring the old town there and then, still recovering from my cold. Her lovely wood-lined home was too close to the highway to Riga for the survival of cats. but after a rest we drove to a nearby castle, Sigulda, explored a Soviet era "Time" hotel whose rooms were transformed into art installations, then I took a cable car to Toraida. There were old towers, a history museum, a sculpture park and a linden tree monument to tragic love. We stopped for huge bowls of delicious soup.

Zane went into the dusk in the forest around her house to pick mushrooms for dinner.Then we drove back to Riga for White Nights, a city-wide cultural celebration, dropping in on concerts, bands, clubs, a labyrinth, and a poetry reading in an old factory in Latvian, Russian and English going past 2 am.

Zane took me to an old sanatorium out of town, which had been the cover for a huge Soviet bunker designed to save 250 people from nuclear fall-out. But there was only enough fuel for the generator for a few weeks. The guide was a historian and old friend of Zane's. We trouped around with a tourbusful from Estonia, to cubicles full of old phones, maps, a kitchen, showers, and an office suite for the chief with a photograph of a young Gorbachev without a birthmark. Construction workers were only on the job a week for secrecy, it took the annual budget of the whole country to build it, and there are hundreds of simpler underground bunkers throughout the country. After the tour we walked with the historian and his son through a nearby national park in the beautiful forest, visiting large enclosures for wolves, fox, owls, moose, beavers...the bears kept escaping and that pen is being redesigned. He also guides for a local paper mill and believes a former head of the plant was once a Soviet officer in Ukraine responsible for many deaths there. Though the paperwork has disappeared, when given a list of workers to be deported to Siberia, he tore up the order. Only a powerful man could do such a thing. I urged him to write a book about this phenomenon.

Another day Zane went potato-picking, a seasonal hobby for many Latvians, while I met Brigitte, another couchsurfing hostess I had met online while trying to decide how to enter Russia from Scandinavia. A tall and cheerful greatgrandmother, elegant in black but younger than me, Brigitte hadn't been able to host me because of an upcoming rendezvous. But most men she meets on the Internet have money on their minds as well as romance. A Madagascar man had squired her to Marseilles and Paris but couldn't bear the Latvian cold mornings. She let one gentleman know she only had ten euros; send it to me, was his reply. She showed me offers of great wealth if she just paid a small deposit...

We stopped in Information for maps and brochures, and explored the old town, then ended our visit in a medieval cellar enjoying mint tea. She told me many Russians in Latvia refuse to learn Latvian, "a language of dogs." The present mayor of Riga is a Russian Zane went to school with; it's a small country! After walking around an enclosed market by the river I sat in the sun reading "Eat Pray Love," Zane's book, in the square (knowing Italy and India and heading for Bali made it great fun) then ran out of time in the history museum before Zane picked me up at Old Gertrude church with a huge bag of potatoes for the winter (her wages for the day's work). She stuffed a pumpkin with ground beef and cheese and baked it for dinner. Yum!

 

Brigitte and I had planned to visit the seaside resort of Jurmala, but Zane's parents wanted her to take them to her father's family's old wooden house hours into the country, so I opted to finally see a 'dacha' instead. We picked them up in their beautiful home in Jurmala, bursting with garden produce, and then drove off to the house off a dirt path in a field. They signed a contract with a local farmer to plant the field to keep it from reverting to forest. After a picnic we snipped and cleared brush, stopped at an old German castle and a spring on the way home. At dusk we drove to her garden in richer soil a few kilometers away for cucumbers, tomatoes and squash she harvested in the fog,

Another day I met Zander, a sweet German teacher anxious to practice her English, who couldn't host but wanted to meet, so we peered together at early 20th century womens' gowns at the Museum of Decorative Arts, then walked to Albert Street, renowned for its Art Nouveau architecture. Classical heads and figures adorn the facades of the mansions. We ended our visit at the rooftop bar of the Hotel Albert for black balsam, the national drink, a strong concoction of herbs and alcohol, where Zane joined us.

The day I got my camera back from bus cargo, we stopped at the tuberculosis hospital where Zane had her lung surgery and she gave her underpaid doctors gift certificates to a new fish restaurant and sunflowers in gratitude. They said she was fine to fly and from the taxi on the way to the airport she left me near Brigitte's and I ended my Latvian days on her couch. She has a lovely, quiet grand-daughter Samantha living with her, always at the computer, and two cats. Her house in the suburbs is a work in progress, she is finishing the upstairs to rent to a couple. I had a lovely bedroom that would soon be closed off for the winter with the softest sheets and pillows. The buses to the city were five minutes away up a dirt track to the street.

One day I spent in the National Art Museum, finally reunited with my camera, then stopped at a history of medicine museum nearby, photographing a dress made of condoms, examining an iron lung, watching videos of dogs being flown into space, and looking at food packets used in space. There was a stuffed dog with a smaller dog implanted in his back. They shared a circulatory system and survived for four days. Then a revisit to Albert Street for photographs and a long detour when I took the wrong bus home. The next day I took the right bus in the wrong direction. I am glad I'm alone, I only drive myself crazy!

My last day in Riga despite the rain I headed out of town to another open air museum, a large complex of old thatched houses, windmills and churches in a forest on a lake. That night Brigitte's oldest friend stopped by with cheesecake and cookies for English conversation, sharing photos of sunsets in Jurmala and animal trophies including a giraffe from a wealthy friend's collection. Brigitte's yard and kitchen, indeed the whole country, is full of apples and she gave me some for my trip. I was grateful Brigitte had taken me in, as previous couchsurfers had overdone coffee, tea and showers, straining her meager pension. I bade farewell to merry Brigitte and caught the Ecolines bus to Vilnius, Lithuania where apples also abound.

2012_09_16 Tallinn, Estonia

My next couch hostess Mare ('sea') and I had a hard time finding each other at the bus station in Tallinn. Her profile picture shows a blonde with a big grin, yet here was a worried-looking brunnette. We circled each other tentatively: 'Alexa?' 'Mare?' and then boarded a tram to her neighborhood by the harbor. Big cruise ships from Scandinavia! (Some Swedes make the trip to have their hair done cheaply!) As a 'pensioner' my fare was free. Mare cooked a lunch of orange mushrooms and potatoes in her beautifully remodeled flat in an old building. I met her daughter, a film student, who lent me an English book to read, Solar by Ewan McGregor, a comic look at the energy crisis. Then we walked through the old town as Mare returned to work - ramparts, towers, medieval lanes, churches and cafes in picturesque squares. I visited a photo museum in the old jail and loaded up with supplies from a supermarket, only getting slightly lost going 'home'.

Mare was married to a Bulgarian and does Bulgarian/Estonian translations besides her day job with the choral society. Estonia has a big national song festival every four years. She told me about a Bulgarian man who was dropped off in Estonia. He thought he was headed for Sweden or Switzerland for work, but he was certain he was still in Bulgaria, being illiterate. Mare sorted all this out for the police. Her son was soon returning from the States where he had a terrible job for an outfit called Southwest, trying to sell books door to door. I had the same miserable experience briefly with encyclopedias.

Mare gave up her pretty bedroom and slept in the kitchen. I was gatekeeper for the cat who used the bedroom window to go in and out. We went to an intimate medieval concert in an old tower with songs by Purcell and original instruments, Hornus Musicus (Garden of Music). Later we had mulled wine in a cafe frequented by Couchsurfers. Rain ruined a planned excursion to the country but then the weather cleared and we found an open house event for the opening of the ballet/opera/orchestra season with free performances of all three. At the end we all joined hands for a satellite photo of the event, circling the national theatre. Then we boarded a tram to the outskirts to see Tsarina Katherine's palace and gardens (closed for renovations), her husband Peter the Great's humble cottage, and the massive site of the national song celebration near the sea. Warm delicious soup, then back home for tea and sweets to meet my next couch, a Russian woman, Svetlana, her boyfriend Alex, and at her modern flat outside the city, her son Andre, who attends a Russian school and doesn't speak Estonian.

Mare had told me the Soviets had broken up families, sending Estonians to Siberia, men separated from their wives and children, many never to return. Estonia was a free nation until the Second World War, when part of the old city was bombed by the Russians, though they denied it. Russian is widely spoken and many were imported to this country with a higher standard of living. In the Middle Ages the blackhead guilds prospered and eventually became part of the Hanseatic League, never having a king. Germany was a favored partner until the war. But you can hardly blame present day Russian speakers for the crimes of their parents or grandparents.

At Svetlana's, on the outskirts, I learned to take the bus to the tram into the city and bought a three-day Tallinn card for forty euros but only by using the costly hop-on-hop-off doubledecker red buses could I justify the expense. The Kumu Art Museum near Katherine's closed palace took a day to see. Very haunting was a room full of sculpted heads, including Lenin's, with a recording of chatter as if all those heads were endlessly arguing. And I was spellbound by a seventy-minute video of a large black and white drawing of an old mansion on a river that slowly transformed with the odd leaf falling, bird flying, boat passing into a forested ruin and back again to a crumbling mansion.

I visited the museum of the occupation (WWII until l99l) where rows of old suitcases and documentary films told the sad story. I explored a medieval tower, the Tallinn and Estonian history museums and an outdoor museum of thatched farmhouses, churches and schools from all over the country. The place to eat was Lido, a cafeteria of Estonian dishes. I could sit in the lobby of the biggest hotel and catch up on my Kindle Fire. I doggedly got my free coffee, marzipan bar and reduced unfiltered beer to get the last value from my Tallinn card.

My last day in the city I caught a cold and Svetlana gave me ginger tea and let me sleep. She had uploaded hundreds of photos (will you ever see them?) onto Picasa web, generous with her time for such a busy working mother. She left me at Mare's office the day I took the bus to Riga so I could look around one last time unencumbered by my luggage. But I left my camera behind, and Mare kindly sent it on to me.

2012_09_15 Searching for Ruth Holden

I traveled to Kazan, east of Moscow, on a mission, to find out anything I could about my ancestor, Ruth Holden. A medical volunteer during World War I, Ruth died of meningitis in Kazan in 1916 at the age of 27. A paleobotanist by vocation, she was buried in a favorite forest next to a church. Her physician father tried to reach Russia to help her, but was not in time.

My sister Amy learned of her existence after making the film,The Other House, written by our grandmother, Rebecca Hooper Eastman. The leading lady's name is Ruth Holden, played by my niece, Rebecca Perkins. We found a living Ruth Holden in her 80's who told us of the existence of her great aunt, whose death was so painful to the family, it was never discussed. We supposed Grandmother Rebecca named the character for Ruth in tribute. Amy plans to make a documentary about Ruth's brief life. She has asked me to research the Radcliffe archives at the end of my travels.

But Kazan in 2012 is a boomtown of traffic jams and new construction, partly due to an upcoming international student Olympics, and there are no forests in the city now. Emails sent from Moscow to Kazan museums yielded nothing.

I traveled from Moscow to Kazan on a sleeper, and though no one spoke English, the soldier traded his lower bunk for my upper one, and my seatmate, headed for Siberia, shared her tea, bread, cheese and jam. The next morning, my Couchsurfing hostess, Gulnara, met me with her son Mark at the train. She was excited to meet an English speaker, and elegant in a wool dress for her job as an accountant. Mark would be starting university soon and it was his job to show me the Kremlin, the historic area, after we inched through a terrible morning traffic jam to their flat downtown.

The apartment was beautiful, large and modern, on the sixth floor. I got the boys' room. Seven-year-old Ilya would sleep in his parents' room, Mark in the kitchen with Thomas, the nearly hairless Egyptian cat. Father Max, a lawyer, was away at the dacha, the summer house in the country. Gulnara is a Tartar, and Max is Jewish. The huge bathroom included a sauna.
Kazan's Kremlin is on a hilltop overlooking the river and a tourist magnet. There is a brand new mosque and a statue of a man in chains. Mark and I wandered through a history museum, but there was nothing to help me find out more about Ruth. Excellent in English, Mark would answer "yes" almost before my questions were out of my mouth. He walked me all over town, finally to a strange pedestrian shopping street. The city has a metro but we never used it. We stopped for lunch in a popular three-floor tea room, bypassing MacDonald's.

Another day the father, Max, appeared, and after dropping Illya off to his grandfather, we fought traffic to visit a monastery outside out of town, where a wedding was happening, and stopped at a restaurant coming back. Max returned to the dacha to supervise workers there, and Gulnara, Ilya and I walked around the center. Gulnara showed me photos of her trips to Spain, and that night the three delivered me to the station for my trip back to Moscow.

*

No sleeper, but a coach seat overnight to the capital. Upon arrival, I had to change my ticket from Moscow to Minsk (or another 200-dollar visa was necessary) for a ticket to my next destination, Tallinn, Estonia. Just dragging my luggage to the right station was an ordeal. But I still had museums in Moscow to visit!

Despite detailed instructions, I needed help finding my next home from the metro. But Pejaoulsta, gde...otchen spaseba usually works. On the first floor of a block of flats was my new couch with Valentina, who spent her time at a hospital with a friend who had an untreated stroke in another country. But her daughter Lisa was there with Zoe and Gregory, who did very well without diapers though less than a year old. American dad Danny had to run off to his job on a film crew. I sounded out Russian words to Zoe from her toddler books. She is a beginning speaker in English, Russian and her own language. Lisa°s brother Alex and his girlfriend would show up later at night, as did Valentina, who gave up her bedroom and insisted on sleeping on the couch in the kitchen. At night the ceiling glowed with stars from the time it was Lisas bedroom. Danny shared his English books and I devoured Akira Kurosawa°s account of his childhood and youth.

Another happy family home from which to venture out to metros and museums. The state history museum on Red Square was one day, the old Tretyakovsky fine arts museum another. Finally, a trip to Gorky Park, the sculpture park for my appetite for Soviet era artifacts, and the new Tretyakovsky museum with large paintings of a benevolent Stalin. A couple more Couchsurfers squeezed in for the last night from Germany, then Zoe, Gregory and Lisa saw me off to a tram to the station on the last day of my visa.

My train left at 6 pm but I did not reach Estonia until 4 am the next day, and that spelled trouble, the conductress let me know. My seatmate left early so I tried to sleep on the two seats and await my doom. Sure enough, the train stopped, the lights went on, the officials came and I was detrained to a nearby building and given a bench to wait for the banks to open (I had dispensed with my rubles). An Azerbaijani's 50 ruble taxi ride ended up costing 300, but after paying twenty dollars for the extra day - my August visa ended the 30th, inexplicably - I was delivered to the Estonian border for another agonizing wait, then a 2 euro taxi to the bus station and a ticket to Tallinn, the capital. A new seatmate, an Estonia who lives in Siberia but prefers to speak French to English, and thanks to the kindness of strangers, my new couch was alerted I would be much later than expected. Farewell to Russia, hello Eastern Europe!

--

2012_09_09 Where are you?

In response to my concern at not hearing from her for a while, Alexa wrote..

Hello from Riga Latvia. I caught a cold my last day in Tallinn, Estonia and have gotten behind. Will try to catch up soon!

Alexa

2012_09_01 More from Russia

on Sept 1, 2012 Alexa sent me this in response to my notification that she has a new blog address, which she can update herself some day..

Thanks, Barbara, and here is an informal update of the latest.

Terrible end to my journey to Russia. 
Today it is raining. Couchsurfing continues to bless me!
I realize I have an awful lot of photos. So no place really stores so many for free. I am always on borrowed computers but I will have a look asap. I realize itäs one heck of a lot of work!  (And Estonian keyboards are weird!)
I realize I have an awful lot of photos. So no place really stores so many for free. I am always on borrowed computers but I will have a look asap. I realize itäs one heck of a lot of work!  (And Estonian keyboards are weird!)


At the 6 pm train to Tallinn, the ticket-taker saw a problem. My visa would expire at midnight, I would reach the border at 4 am. Disaster! What would happen? 

At least my seatmate left the train and I had two seats to try to sleep in. I was removed from the train and left in a border control building for hours until a taxi took me to a bank that opened at 9:30 (I spent my last roubles on New Trestakyovski Museum, and the sculpture park, fantastic, many pictures) and my visa card did not work but I had some dollars ready

 and taxi back to the building, got my passport, taxi back to the border and six times the fare the policeman mentioned was demanded. 

A long time with the Russian customs woman, many phone calls before I was allowed into Estonia, a 2 euro 2 minute taxi ride to the bus from St Petersburg to Tallinn and conversing in French with an Estonian woman living in Siberia. 

A kindly Russian woman had alerted my hostess in Tallinn of my troubles-I did not know of the time difference, but Mare was waiting for the bus. We did not recognize each other for some ten minutes, her hair was a different color and she was not smiling as she was in her profile picture. A beautiful flat close to the old city and we will take a bus excursion to Kolkja and Varija tomorrow.