It was somewhere around this Helsinki trip that I got really into shooting B&W again. I got excited for the snow, thinking it'd give me some good opportunities with B&W. Unfortunately, then I went and fucked up my exposure.

At the end of January I got up terribly early and trudged through a black Petersburg morning to get on a bus alone and go the 9 hours to Helsinki. My separate rangefinder died on this trip, and thus began my string of bad photo equipment luck.




Helsinki was a surprisingly small and walkable city. The city center itself is like a 45 minute walk from one end to the other, and even the place I was staying, though not really near the center, was still doable on foot.






The botanic gardens were adorably small.




I have heard some Russians joke that Finns are so physically active because there is nothing else to do in Finland, but I found the sportiness charming.




It was evident that Helsinki had a past interlaced with Russia (the statue in this square is a Russian tsar), but it was also modern, European, and shockingly (given their proximity) different in mentality from St. Petersburg.

Some photos from January of this year, when I was on break from classes. Notable things that I did usually involved going to museums.










During one of our days of museum travel, my friend and I found, in a crowded Burger King of all places, a pair of blockadnitsi--that is, someone who survived the Siege of Leningrad in 1941-44. St. Petersburg holds a place of honor for such folks, enough so that they have that specific name for them, and they are honored alongside veterans during the Victory Day parade in May. These were a pair of adorable old ladies who gladly let us sit next to them and gave us chocolates and wished us and all our friends happiness and success in life.

My friend's Russian friend had a job as a freelance roof cleaner during winter. Which sounds pretty bomb-ass cool for a college kid who likes to get harnessed up and hang out in high places.

The end of the first semester of my study abroad program involved entirely too much pomp and circumstance and officality for my tastes. My opinion of the closing ceremony was more along the lines of these folks, who all seem to look like they are having a lot of fun:



Taking turns waiting for the oral final exam for Conversation:






The last night of the first semester was basically us all just going out to the bars. It was a night in which I kind of sat around with cheap shitty beer while people around me burst into tears and accused me of being unfeeling when I just stared blankly at them. Yeah, I guess. Or maybe the breaking of artificial attachments four months in the making was just not enough to evoke the waterworks from me. Call me crazy.







We were in this bar at like 3AM and managed to break two glasses in twenty minutes. The beauty of Russian winters is that it is dark basically all the time, and when the bars close so late that I was never actually in one of them long enough to see closing time, and you're walking distance from your apartment, well, why not be out all night?

I'm on vacation. You know, from, uh... not having a job. I have been getting tanlines, swimming with jellyfish, and eating figs off the tree.

As a break from the long depiction of Russian winter, I have for you a pictorial instruction for how I was just recently taught to prepare unripe walnuts for consumption.