Let a hundred schools of Luigi contend

You mean the Nazis? I’d argue he didn’t kill enough of them

glad to have served my part in creating today’s struggle session

Good lord it’s a cheeseburger!

I found Comrade Lenin in St Petersburg. It is a very sunny day.

The border crossing into Russia from Estonia yesterday was abominably long, it took 7 hours for me to get across. I had heard people saying 4 hours was unusually long, so idk what happened then. Obviously, that meant that the bus I had which was scheduled to arrive at 18h15 actually arrived around midnight at the St Petersburg bus station, and I couldn’t get into the hostel I made a reservation for when I finally arrived there around 0h40 (I guess me not speaking Russian made that way harder for me). I had to look in the city for two hours, seeing tons of closed hotels/hostels, until I finally found a pretty cheap but nice place thanks to really dumb luck (I still can’t believe it, if I am being honest), and thankfully just before it rained too.

Lesson learned: don’t take the mid-morning bus from Tallinn to St Petersburg unless you want to take the risk of sleeping outside when you arrive; leave as early as possible (does it show that I fairly new to traveling alone?)

Yesterday wasn’t all bad, of course; the people I met at the border were really kind, I met a fellow Fr*nch person who had already been multiple times to Russia who reassured me on some points, a Russian woman who agreed to exchange some of my euros with some of her rubles so I could actually pay for stuff like my hostel (since the banks would have been closed when we’d arrive), and a Russian man behind us decided to give everyone around vodka to keep warm in the rain (at around hour 4 or 5 of waiting), which for me was a mistake since I can’t really stand alcohol well, so I then had to try and get less drunk before actually entering the checkpoints (which I thankfully managed to do), etc… So that was something! I think I’ll remember this day all my life.