Cruisin' Around Part 2

Last time I was writing I got up to Helsinki so I will start where I left off, after Helsinki we went to St Petersburg. I am returning to St Petersburg later and I would rather write about it all together but one thing that I will say is that they don't make it easy to get to Russia. It was a painful experience trying to get a Russian visa and because I only have a single entry visa I couldn't use it when I was on the cruise or I wouldn't have been able to get back in later. Cruise companies have some sort of arrangement that you are allowed to get off the ship in St Petersburg but only as part of a tour and you still have to go through an airport like immigration process where you fill out an immigration card. As soon as your tour is done you have to return right back to the ship and you have very little leway. This was pretty funny compared to a lot of the other stops where you literally walk off the ship and right into town.
After St. Petersburg we went to Tallin which was a really beautiful city. Being honest I really knew virtually nothing about Tallin before I got there and all I know about Estonia I learned from Liisa and Heli and the other Esto girls at Guelph. Which for the record mostly involved drinking, so it seemed fitting that we get beers in one of the main squares in Tallin. Adrienne and I met up with one of the guys from Florida and a couple of the bartenders, two Peruvians and a Brazilian. Aside from drinking, as I said Tallin is a beautifully preserved medieval city there are still some stone forts and amazing old buildings. Entirely unrelated and somewhat random but one of the things I most vividly remember from Tallin is that as we were walking around the city we came across a stroller on the side of the road only to realize that there was a baby inside. Someone had left their baby on the street while they went into the store, we stayed for a couple minutes so it wasn't a quick stop either. Sam later told me that apparently its a rather common practice in that part of the world and she saw it when she was in Copenhagen all the time. Apparently some woman recently got arrested in NYC for child endangerment after doing that. Im all for cultural understanding but that one I definitely don't get.
The final stop on the cruise was Gothenburg Sweden, we again opted to walk around the city instead of taking a tour although our grandparents did a tour of the volvo factory which sounded kind of cool. They had all the different Volvo models you could try and drive around their track, including some of the really sporty ones. Again a very beautiful Scandanvian city, lots of beautiful blonde familys walking around, winding canals and a University campus that definitely put Guelph to shame. One funny thing I remember from Gothenburg though was that we were there during some kind of festival and there was a display set up for the military. It wasn't anything to do with recruitment I think just kind of a public relations sort of thing. There were these various, jovial looking military personel with painted faces of different camoflauge (sp?) colours and some assault rifles and tanks and things that you could actually go play with and try out. There was this kid playing with a machine gun on top of a tank, it was definitely a different attitude towards the military from what we're used to in North America.
So just a couple random notes on the cruise; the food was okay, way better than any all inclusive resort I've been to but still that kind of mass production style. I said this already but the staff really were the best part, they were actually really amazing, my grandparents were astounded when our waiter and assistant waiter at dinner were Serbian and Croatian respectively and seemed to get along perfectly. As much as I complained that everyone was old we did meet some nice people close to our age, three guys from Florida who seemed to spend the entire time gambling and drinking, one of them let slip what they managed to rack up in bar charges and let me say it was impressive! We met a really nice guy who was a firefighter and from NYC, he was probably one of the most genuinely nice people that I have ever met. All in all we had a surprisingly fun time and I think me and Adrienne were both really happy that we went.