I was in Russia for long enough that when study abroad students I'd met my first term there returned the next year for a new program I was still around.

Have I talked yet about my disposable camera? Towards the end of my time in Russia my camera situation was growing a bit sad. I'd broken the 50mm lens for my SLR and only had a long and wide lens left. That and my Rollei point and shoot had seized up and refused photography. So, at the suggestion of my lovely friend Laura during my UK trip I supplemented with plastic disposable cameras.



One of these was the sort of pink and heart-covered thing used to obviously market something towards little girls, and I remember when I took it in to get developed, back in St. Pete. The place was in sort of a basement in a courtyard behind a sometimes-locked gate. Most of the clerks behind the counter ranged from grudgingly barely willing to help me to bored and ambivalent (with the exception of one guy, cute in that arty-hipster unconventionally attractive way, who seemed amused instead of annoyed at my American accent and who would try out his English on me with a word here and there). Anyway, the point is that the people here liked to act like they hated their lives, and especially their foreign customers. However, there was the day I brought in the pink plastic camera and handed it to the man behind the counter.
"Do you develop things like this?"
He looked at it for a split second before turning and passing it to a guy behind him who seemed very much to be the person who dealt hands-on with the developing stuff. "Do we develop these?"
And the grouchy, preoccupied-looking Russian man-who-did-developing, as he held the pink plastic little-girl camera in his hands, actually smiled. Very briefly, but it did not escape me. He answered that they did and then passed the camera back to the counter guy, who stuffed it into one of those universal paper envelopes used by film processing places. And then I probably got back some very grainy scans of shots from Edinburgh.




Though I found some places in the city that sold disposable cameras and so was able to continue using them until I got back to the states and fixed my Rollei, I didn't run across any more of the pretty pink heart variety, sadly.

Seeing as how I left St. Petersburg over a year ago, it's about time to start saying goodbye, eh?





What the fuck happened to this trashcan?








My favorite Nikitushka.

Another Tallinn video:

010 from Maria O on Vimeo.

I think it was May of 2013 when our group went to the Pskov region, south-west of St. Petersburg. As usual, for my summer-deprived brain it seemed like every degree change in latitude was a step through time, this time forward towards a long-awaited spring.






The trip was a mashup of activities and locations that resulted in a chaotic chronology of photos.




We were staying at some resort that was at least an hour away from everywhere we wanted to go.






It seemed like we spent as much time in the bus as anything else.

The bus to Pushkin's estate, where we got a tour of the place he was exiled to when he inevitably pissed off the tsar.







Another bus ride to where Pushkin's mother was buried.








A bus to this little area meant to demonstrate peasant Russian life back in the day.







A drive and a tour of some area that I remember nothing about.




There's something in the water around Pskov. It's holy or something, because people drag big plastic jugs out to this stream and out to the wells in the monastery to fill up.











Another trip to some set of beautiful churches full of the hyper-orthodox. All the women had to wear head scarves and (along with one boy unlucky enough to have shown up in shorts) had to wrap their bottom halves in long skirts.








I guess it was Easter weekend while we were there, and what I remember about this place was fucking up the greeting. On Easter you're not supposed to say "Hello, how are you?" you're supposed to say something about Jesus rising or some shit. Which I forgot about doing.




But of course the most memorable parts of the trip happened back at the resort/hotel. The debauchery of the students getting drunk, wandering into the woods, doing drugs, hooking up...








My first banya experience! Naked with the group of girls in the steam room, jumping from there into the pool, then back to the steam room to get (gently) whacked with branches. Good stuff.




And a crazy crimson sunset that lasted for hours and painted everything impossible-to-color-balance-red for its full duration.

And that was the Pskov trip.

Some videos from Tallinn:

IMG 0095 from Maria O on Vimeo.

IMG 0104 from Maria O on Vimeo.

IMG 0106 from Maria O on Vimeo.

During my Tallinn trip there were a number of situations that were, for one reason or another, unphotographable.

There was the medieval-themed restaurant in the city square, warm and stuffy and incredibly dark, lit only by candles. I don't remember if the ceilings were low and the space was actually oppressively small or if the circles of candlelight just seemed to pull the walls in and make everything a tight squeeze. I had some scrumptious meat stew that I couldn't see, served to me in a clay container that was only slightly less of a mystery in the dark. I think the place was known for their meat pies, but I don't really have a memory of those.

Then there was that night that we kind of randomly ended up in that food place that was maybe a pizza place or maybe a hamburger place or maybe a middle eastern falafel place but was really just the open-late, sparsely and cheaply furnished, neon-and-fluorescent-lit tiny food place down the street from the hostel. I was either tired or drunk or both, because I remember sitting at a cafeteria-type table and having to focus too much energy on eating the pizza or fries or falafel.

And also there was a drunk card game with the Russians staying at the hostel. I think they didn't know much English, and were thus my favorite kind of Russians. I don't remember much about the game except that I liked it a lot and the cards all had cartoons of different anamorphized pigs on them.

And finally, after my travel mates and I got sick of one another at the TV tower, we split up and I walked alone, back through the forest cemetery, through a tombless patch of trees, and to the beach. Here I thought about the imprints that each place you live leaves in you. On this beach I realized that, after years in Oregon and multiple trips to the coast, standing on the beach and staring out at the ocean* was comforting. Strangely so, because I spent all that time in Oregon complaining about the weather and how having the ocean nearby did not make up for it because what the hell do I need to go to the ocean for? I found out later that further along the beach becomes a nude beach, but I didn't walk that far and it was still too cold for that kind of behavior anyway.


*Tallinn's on a gulf, not on the ocean. Turns out the nostalgia center of my brain didn't distinguish.

Day Three?








I unfortunately don't know a damn thing about this monastery except that I really liked that no one was stopping us from climbing all over it.

















Tallinn had these really unexpected and really cool coniferous forests out by the beach.




That were apparently also military graveyards. This was the nicest place to spend eternity that I've ever seen.




And after the walk through the forest-graveyard we reached the TV tower/tourist attraction. I gleefully spent way too much (the dollar-euro rate killed me on this trip) on a postcard referencing the tower's antennas that I could mail back to my college antennas teacher.






Can you tell that my shoes have been through three days of walking since the photo on day one? They held together pretty well, but I did have to retire them for the rest of my time abroad and take them in for repair ("Would I like to just buy a new pair? Are you kidding me, sister???") once I got back stateside.










The green and brown land in the lower part of the frame was a botanical garden that we didn't make it to before they closed.

It was about at this point that I ran out of film (yes, again, even though I'd already once found and ventured out to an overpriced camera store in a shopping center) and had to supplement with the camera on my iPod Touch. I don't think there was anything good on there besides a video that I'll post just as soon as I remember how to.