Eh, Comrade?!

3:22am MSD/August 30, 2008 – 7:22pm EDT

Eventful day today… Woke up around 10:30 after losing an hour of sleep to yet another time change. Thankfully after tomorrow, we start to get those hours back. Really I should say I woke up around 5:30 and then slept fitfully and not very well until about 9:45 and then was doing great… Til I had to get up. Bah. Got dressed and went to the theater to help hang lights. That was a bitch. I don’t know how much a Martin 2000 weighs but it’s too damn much to be hoisting on a single pulley way up onto a catwalk. They have electric winches but the Filipinos say they’re “too slow”… I think we’ll be using them next time anyway – to hell with that!

Ate lunch (or breakfast, as it were) and came back to my cabin for a shower. Picked up my pay – which was more than I thought it was going to be, happily… still not enough of course – and came BACK to the cabin again to pack my backpack for the day. I do a lot of back and forth here. Forgetting things or going somewhere only to come right back… It’s lame. But it’s fairly cold in here so I generally don’t mind haha… Anyway, departed and headed for the gangway to make my way into St. Petersburg. Got to the customs desk and, when I didn’t have a photocopy of my passport, was turned away. The security guys on the gangway told me if I showed them my crew ID, they would let me through… So I did (went to a different line!) and got through no problem. It’s been my experience overall that Russians aren’t very… warm and friendly. To say the least. Stood around for a few and then got on the crew shuttle van to head for the city.

Which is a good way to segue into my next point – traffic in St. Petersburg (and I imagine Russia as a whole) is fucking SCARY. There’s not much in the way of lines on the road, and what is there doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and isn’t really paid any heed anyway. People weaving in and out of traffic, multiple cars making turns from all lanes… Including the van driver. I kind of feared for my life, not gonna lie. I’ve never seen anything like that. I mean at least sometimes they use their turn signals. But this made Washington DC and Chicago look like a gentle, mid-afternoon lunch rush. Very discomforting. Very happy when we got dropped off at Issac’s Square. I walked around with Matt and his girlfriend Candi, who is what is known onboard as a JAR. JAR stands for Jean Anne Rynd (sp?) which is the company I believe I mentioned before that is contracted out to do all the shows. Yeah, Candi works for them and is in the shows onboard. Anyway, after taking a few pictures of St. Issac’s Cathedral, we headed for the Peter and Paul fortress. Along the way, we stopped at this really neat old bank to change some dollars into Russian rubles. 24 rubles = 1 dollar. Or at least today. When I go back tomorrow, I hope it’s gone down some so I’ll get more dollars for my rubles!

St. Petersburg, like Stockholm, is a couple of islands connected by bridges. Or rather, it’s a couple parts of mainland that encircle a bay, with an island or 2. Anyway bridges over water, that’s my point. We had to cross several. Got there and walked around the outside wall of the fortress… Went inside, and made for the cathedral. Bought tickets and went in and took lots of pictures. Apparently the Cathedral of the Spilt Blood is even more spectacular… We’ll see tomorrow. Stopped at a stand and got some food and drink. Very difficult to communicate with Russians – they don’t speak ANY English and the language is so different (as opposed to French, German, Finnish, etc) that it can be very difficult for both parties to make themselves understood. Couple cups of coffee, a Pepsi Max in a bottle, a hot dog, a bag of chips, a microwave apple pie pastry thing, and some chocolate covered sunflower seeds… The coffee and hot dog were pretty terrible but… Everything else (read: the prepackaged things) was good. Paid some more rubles to go up on the wall of the fortress and walk around. For both the cathedral and the wall, we showed our NCL crew badges and claimed we were students and got the half price discount. So the language barrier DID help us a bit. The wall was neat – a nice view of the city. Of course it started to rain (again) while we were walking around on it but… It was still a nice view. Got to the end and headed back, and back to the shuttle. We had to kind of hurry to get to the shuttle on time and I was pretty exhausted by the time we got there. Very brisk pace.

Matt and Candi have, of course, been to St. Petersburg before… I say of course because they’ve been on this boat for a while… So they’ve been doing laps around this course for a while. So they weren’t real into a lot of exploring, and after feeling like I needed to keep up with them to get back to the shuttle, I was ready to drop. So I opted to come back to the ship and just go back to the city tomorrow, since we’re docked here overnight. Before heading into the ship, I stopped at the CD/DVD store and souvenir store right next to the berth… Got a couple Russian DVDs, which I’m sure are some kind of bootlegged… One of them sucks and I’m considering taking it back to swap for a more expensive one (a dollar more)… I don’t think they’ll mind. They said if there were problems we could return them and exchange so… Also got something for my parents…

So came back on board, had some dinner, and then came back to my cabin to watch a movie and just lay for a while. As I mentioned, pretty exhausted. At about 11:15, I ran up to the crew store to get my shuttle pass for tomorrow, and then came back to the cabin. Since tonight is an overnight stay, they let crew bend the rules a bit and they throw a big party in one of the guest areas of the ship, up on deck 13 (remember, I live on deck 3!). I moseyed up there to check it out and… everybody was dressed kinda nice and dancing and whatever. I felt kind of out of place in my shorts and t-shirt, so I came BACK to the cabin (see what I mean?!) to wash my face and change into something nicer. Once done, I headed back up and hung out til the end of the party. I mostly sat off to the side watching, but talked to a few people I’ve met in the last week. I suppose all told, it was more a waste of money than anything… I had to pay for my drinks. I don’t know if they were charging for beer, but they were certainly charging for liquor. But it’s not like I really met anyone new or… strengthened any connections with anyone I already knew… I suppose I had a reasonably good time all things considered so I don’t mind too much…

Some people got really drunk. And there are still people partying around the ship – I hear a few down the hall. Pretty funny and… Cool I guess. I just wish I knew more people so I could partake some in the merriment. We’ll be back in St. Petersburg in a week or so, so maybe by then I’ll be a little better off if they do this again. I kinda hope they will.

Finally, the damn phone thing won’t work so I can’t dial out. It’s only early evening at home and I was hoping to make a phone call or two, but apparently not! Jerks. And I still haven’t figured out the laundry thing. I really need to do that – work clothes are getting very slim.

Ok, it’s nearly 4am and I have a meeting at 11 and a bunch of things I want to see in St. Petersburg still. And I feel like my typing might potentially be disturbing Igor. Not likely, he’s a pretty heavy sleeper, which is good… But I just feel better being cautious about such things. I want to be a good roommate and not “that guy”. Hm just heard a snore, guess I’m ok. But the other thing, about it being real damn late… that still stands. I really wish I could get wifi in my cabin. And this blog entry is onto the third page now in Word. I blather a lot. Apparently you don’t mind too much or you wouldn’t have made it this far!

Soooooooo…. G’night!