The previous part left our humble heroes in the train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Here's what happened then...

We got to the hotel and somehow managed to get the stuff inside regardless of the receptionists "too much luggage" -claims and again tried our strength against Russian autumn-turn-winter. We had decided to spend our tourist-time at the local museum of etnography, the infamous Kunstkammer, where the freak-collection of Peter the Great is displayed! Gruesome fetuses and deadborn two-headed babies stored in alcohol! Malformed animals! Disgusting stuff! Great way to spend the day! Bring the kids!

Luckily the walk there took us past the Hermitage, so everyone got to see one of the most astonishing buildings in the world with their own eyes.

Not that luckily the walk included us crossing the Neva river by a bridge. Not luckily, since the wind of the day before had followed us to St. Petersburg and I can assure you that crossing one of the largest rivers in the world on a day like that with clothing made for finnish autumn weathers is not the thing you want to do. Anyway, we did it. Unanimously we voted to make the trip back with "taxis", meaning that we just stopped three regular cars and payed the driver somewhere in the region of 2-3 euros to drive us to Vosstanya square.

Also not luckily, somewhere along the way Esa's wallet got stolen in a ruch hour subway crowd. Fortunately it didn't include a lot of money, but the hassle of getting all the cards renewed is always a pain in the ass. Russia, Esa will remember this!

At this point morale was starting to reach a low point due to malnutrition and moist footwear. Not to mention the general lack of warmth, so we decided that a nice restaurant would be our solution of choise.

The problem is that even though the chinese place we chose was nice and warm, it was also painfully inefficient. We ordered our food in high hopes, but in the end the confusion was total as a rather large part of the orders somehow managed to get forgotten or lost and the speed of delivery left a lot to be hoped for. This - again - totally fucked up the schedule, leaving Riku waiting for about 45 minutes outside the hotel and the people at the venue as well. Luckily tonight was not as tightly scheduled as the night before. Only that it had to be over by 11 pm! What a lovely schedule! Most finnish venues would have a lot to learn from these places!

Anyway, the venue - Moloko (that's "milk" in Russian) - is probably the coolest place in the world. It's just perfect. Nice sounding room, nice atmosphere, comfortable size and tasty decoration. I've had some of the best times in this place, like this certain Marscheider Kunst -concert that was pretty much the most I've ever danced in my life. Good times, good times…

And the night of November the 21st was no exception. These are the types of gigs I play for. There was a nice amount of people (I'd say around 80 or so) through the door and the feeling was very friendly, and appreciative. I felt like we really connected with the people in some way. I loved every second of our playing and I felt totally purified from the previous evening and all of it's awkward admiration. Just felt like I was home again.

After the show we (well, Jani from IC + Viola + Henkka) went to spend the night at Szarapov's place. He's the guy who booked the show at Moloko and who helped a great deal with this trip in other ways as well and very few words do him justice. He's the weirdest dude out there, but the sweetest and coolest one as well. Unfortunately he didn't resemble Jack Osbourne this time as much as in the past.

As Anu, Henkka and Jani were leaving in the wee hours of the morning, we went to this nice 24 hour grocery store to get souvenir vodka, beer and candy for the people who were leaving in the morning. Then we went to Szarapov's and watched DVD's (Monthy Python, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds…) through the night (ok, I fell asleep) until the people going home were supposed to take a taxi to the train station. Then the rest of us had a few hours of sleep as well to shake off the weariness of this long day and to prepare ourselves for one last day of heavy tourism.

We had no plans for this day other than to just walk around and walk we did. First we rode this rather sick express bus that was like a hybrid between a taxi and a bus. The speciality about this one was this totally deranged driver who had done a correspondance course to get his drivers license. Although I heavily doubt he had one in the first place. I was sure I'd die and leave a smoking corpse. To quote a finnish genious: "Vastaantulijoiden kaistalla, on vittumaista luistella".

We made it to the same cafe as yesterday for breakfast in one piece anyway and prepared ourselves heartily for the whole day. Fortunately the people of Moloko were kind enough to let us leave our stuff into their back room, so we didn't have to haul all that stuff around. Phew!

The first thing we visited was a music store where I bought some cool Russian percussive instruments like a triangel and claves and such. I also got the coolest melodica in the world to make our December shows even merrier! After we had rummaged about in the store for a while the clerks picked up a local rock magazine from the rack, leafed through it a bit and asked us whether or not we're Viola. We said yes and left.

The next big event of the day was shopping around at a local courtyard marketplace. We weren’t really looking for anything special and we had already wandered round for a while and were getting a bit bored when somehow we bumped into this little shop with knick-knacks, thingamajigs and doodads and such and amongst all other things shone a bunch of Christmas hats and we were ready to go! One thing started leading to another and before we knew what was going on, we were finding store after store after store with heaps of tacky Christmas decorations aplenty! They were everywhere and each carried more tasteless crap than the other! We went nuts. There was this one beautiful moment, where Riku and I saw this blinking star at the very same moment, looked at each other and just knew that that star had a special place in our December live shows! It had to be bought and it was…

The rest of the day was more or less just killing time. Internet café, food, wandering, shopping… The only proper incident was when I had to remove some gentleman’s hand from my pocket while queuing at a grocery store. He probably just mistook it for his own.

Then it was time for the bus.

I managed to use (with the convenient help of our local tour-guide, Gene) my superior haggling-skills and got us into the buses with about 8 euros per head, which is definitely not a lot for a trip from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. The only problem is that after Gene had left, the lady at the bus seemed to have a lot to say to us, but we were unable to find a common language, but luckily she gave up before we did, since she seemed to have something in mind that involved us buying many cartons of cigarettes from her and we weren’t really that into it.

Then the trip began and luckily it went quietly and smoothly. Then we came to the border and that’s where the fun was about to begin. I was the first one at the passport-check and for some reason it seemed to take forever for the lady to check my passport and I started to get a bit uncomfortable. The fact that she concluded her intense staring with a shake of her head didn’t really help either. Obviously, she didn’t speak English, but she knew enough signs to indicate, that my visa had run out an hour and a half ago and that I was in deep, deep shit.

Then I was escorted to a room in the back. I was left with a younger guy, who had the appearance of a very enthusiastic servant of the government and this impression didn’t really disappear when the first comment he had for me was "zis is bad, very very bad".

The thing is, I had to apply for a second visa, since my first one didn’t start until Friday since at the time when we first applied to them, we didn’t know we’d be playing on Friday. Then I got a second one that was applied for so late, that I got it on the morning of our departure, so I didn’t even check to see if it was ok. The thing that happened is that someone made a huge mistake: The second visa was supposed to be until the 26th, but for some weird reason it was only until the 22nd and it was already the 23rd. The first visa was until the 23rd, but it had been made void when the second visa was applied for. So I had two visas. One void and one that had run out.

I have no idea what happened, as the young guy started to show definite signs of kindness after a few minutes and his English got way better. I was sure I’d get beaten and that I’d have to pay huge amounts of money to get out of that mess, but in the end the guy just said strictly “Last time, OK?!”. I agreed. Stern. Stern, but fair.

The others seemed relieved when I walked out alive. The bus we were on would not in a million years have waited for me had it taken a bit more time, but luckily I made it out on time for the bus. Our adventure had to end in some extracurricular adventure, it seems.

The rest was quite eventless, so I’ll wrap this up know. It was fun and it was educating. We learned a lot of new stuff about the world and about ourselves, met wonderful people, saw wonderful sights, traveled in exotic ways and got to play music, but the most important of all, we got cheap and tacky Christmas lights. It was good. It was all good.

I’ll leave you with the wise words of a nice older man on our bus:
"You play group? How?"

Tommi

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