That's all she wrote...

Okay, time for my final post of this wild, crazy, awesome adventure. We’re now in Finland on a bus bound for Helsinki. We were meant to take a train from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, but there is construction on the tracks in Finland, so once we crossed the Finnish border we all disembarked from the train, went through customs then boarded big tour buses. Just another of many quirks and hoops we’ve had to jump through on this journey. The rest of ride will take about four hours. We’re going to Helsinki because flights home were significantly cheaper than flying out of St. Petersburg. Plus, why not see one more city and one more country, right? We’re hoping for a 12:00 noon arrival and time to chill out in a beautiful Nordic city before coming home on Sunday.

The last time I wrote was as we were approaching Moscow for the second time after seeing Korea versus Sweden the night before. There’s no way I’ll be able to aptly sum up the rest of our trip – including two more days in Moscow, an overnight train, then two days in St. Petersburg – so I won’t even try. I’ll hit the high points.

In Moscow we stayed once again at the very clean, well-run Fasol Hostel and saw two more matches, the first being Senegal versus Poland. That match was a trip, probably our second favorite of the whole trip after Mexico/Germany. The crowd was great – a huge contingent of Polish fans and smaller, but loud, group of Senegalese. They wore bright clothes, played instruments and danced and sang throughout the entire match. It helped that they also won the game. By game’s end, anyone who wasn’t cheering for Poland had become an adopted member of the Senegalese fan club. The team approached their fans in the corner below us after the game and did a team-choreographed (maybe some kind of national?) dance. It was pure joy that became contagious.

The game the following night in Moscow was Portugal versus Morocco. This was a good game, not one of our favorites, but we get to say that we saw Ronaldo score a goal. That was a pretty cool thing. It was actually fun to zero in on him throughout the entire match just to see how he plays and how he sets himself up to get into position to score. There were a ton of Moroccan fans in attendance, but because Ronaldo scored early and Portugal kept Morocco out of the goal the rest of the game, their fans were rather quiet.

One drawback of this trip – and one I’d known we’d face – was a lack of time to see the sights. We were in Russia for soccer, so everything else would logically have to take a back seat. And five games in six days was pretty ambitious. We were constantly on the move, often getting only an hour or two here and there to relax. We did see the main Moscow sites, however, the night after the Senegal match and the morning prior to the Portugal match. The scene in the city the night we walked around was intense. Not only were things buzzing in general because of the World Cup, but Russia played and won so the people were going absolutely berserk. At one point we found ourselves on a very long pedestrian boulevard packed with partiers. It was wild, and none of us really wanted to be there. We found an exit from the madness after 5-10 minutes, then happily found a metro back to our hostel. The next morning was more our style and we managed to walk around Red Square and see the Kremlin, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Lenin and Stalin’s tombs and a bunch of other cool stuff. I really like the vibe of Moscow, and all of us loved our neighborhood where we stayed. If I can one day, I’d love to come back. It’s a pretty incredible place to see first-hand.

The night following the Portugal win, we had tickets on a night train to St. Petersburg. One really cool feature of this experience is that Russia has made all public transportation free. That includes the metros, some city buses, trains between cities and even overnight sleeper cars. So instead of paying for another night of accommodations, we slept for free on the train. The three of us had our own compartment, and by the end of a very busy day we got a little loopy and silly together. It was a fun ride.

The last two days of our trip were in St. Petersburg. Because we arrived into the city at 6:00 a.m. we had about six hours to kill before checking into our Airbnb. We wandered down the main boulevard, Nevsky Prospect, and poked our heads into a Russian Orthodox cathedral. We also strolled to the Neva River, seeing some more monuments, buildings and parks including the Hermitage Musuem which is the former winter palace of the Romanov dynasty. We found a little, hidden, 2^nd floor café and chilled a bit more. Next came our Airbnb check in experience. I’m not going to go into it in detail, because it sort of sucked, but let’s just say how I spent the next several hours wasn’t part of the itinerary. Essentially what happened is that we had to officially “register” because we are not Russian citizens. This involves filling out paperwork and making copies of all our documents. This, I found out, is a normal procedure for American travelers in Russia, but what I continually tried to do was convince our Russian host that the normal procedures have been relaxed because of the World Cup. I made phone calls and e-mails, but she just wouldn’t listen to me. Bottom line, we had to go to a sketchy, but memorable, copy center, copy ALL our docs then meet our Airbnb host a couple hours later to pay her about $45 to register us. Russia, baby! Now that we’re out of the country, we’ve learned that I was right. The registration documents our host gave us this morning before we left were completely irrelevant and not needed when we left Russia. Maybe she just wanted our money!

St. Petersburg was cool, too, but I think we all agree that we enjoyed Moscow a bit more. Moscow felt, well, just more Russian. Everything in St. Petersburg was a little more cleaned up, polished and efficient. Good, I guess, but just not the same interesting vibe as in Moscow. Plus it’s pretty clear St. Petersburg receives more tourists than does Moscow. There were street hawkers passing out leaflets and the big city costumed locals posing for pictures (and for money) that you see in other big tourist cities around the world. St. Petersburg is on the European big boat cruise route and it’s much easier to get into St. Petersburg without a special visa than it is to get into Moscow which accounts for the more touristy vibe. But… we still enjoyed our time here and I’m really glad we got to see another very legendary Russian city. Prior to our trip I had read a book about Shostakovich and the 900-day siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by the Nazi’s during World War II. So with that context it was fun to see many of the places I had read about. St. Petersburg has a ton of history, of course, in addition to World War II including the story of Peter the Great’s basic creation of the city, the reign of the Romanov dynasty, the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s and the rise of Lenin’s Bolshevik party which led to decades of communist rule. Just like Moscow, I’d love to go back to St. Petersburg and have more time to soak in all its history.

Last night we saw Brazil barely beat Costa Rica, then we spent a couple hours checking out Michelangelos, Rembrandts and Davincis at the enormous Hermitage museum before having another long Russian dinner at a pub close to our apartment.

I guess it’s time, now, to sum things up. I’m not going to say much because it’s pretty hard to put my emotions into words at the moment and because I think this experience, honestly, will become richer with time. I know that I’ll look back on this trip as one of the best, if not the best, trips of my entire life. It wasn’t a vacation. It was a quest, and almost everything, fell into place according to the plan we’d set over the past many months. We did it. We survived Russia and the crazy World Cup. And I feel like I’ve achieved a lifelong dream in the process. We rocked a week in Norway, then the kids and I conquered Russia. That’s honestly how I feel. I’ll remember most of all the hundreds of kind, enthusiastic Russian people we met and who helped us along the way. I’ll also remember the countless fans we met from what seemed like all corners of the globe. People were happy. Just happy to be here, happy to chat, happy to hang out. It really was like one giant, week-long party. I’m beyond glad we did it. I’d do it again. Who knows, maybe I will? Qatar 2022 anyone?