End of Russia and Traveling Home

Hello!
It's been a while!

If you could see our calendar for the month of June you would see that almost every day had something in it. Many friends had us over for dinner or went places with us. It was an excellent time for us and we loved being able to spend our last month in Russia in that way. It was also nice to be able to say goodbye to people at a more relaxed pace and to not rush back since we are in limbo until the middle of August.

Part of our June adventures included seeing different things in the city before we left. One place we went with our friend (who was also Matt's Russian teacher) was the Republic of Cats. It's a coffee shop on one side and on the other side is a cat heaven! :-)
The cats have all been rescued or have been mousers in the Hermitage. And there is a great variety of cats there.

Giant cat throne

mural of the city with it's famous rooftops and cats

my favorite was the "naked cat"

This one was Matt's favorite cat

Another thing we checked off of our list was riding the "retro tram." As the name suggests it is a tram that is still styled similarly to the ones from the Soviet era. In the picture below you can see a row of Soviet era ads. 

It takes a really nice route through the main parts of the city and there is a guide who fills you in on some tram history. 

Our metro station through the retro tram window

The retro tram!

The Political History Museum was something we had heard about but since there are a lot of museums in St Petersburg we had put it off. It was easily one of the best museums we've seen in the city. The museum is located in two different houses, one of which belonged to a famous Russian ballerina, Mathilda-Marie Kschessinskaya. Her house was taken over by the Communist Party (she fled to Paris) and one of the rooms facing the street was Lenin's office and the balcony was where Lenin addressed a crowd. 

Their current temporary exhibit, chronicling the beginning of political history in Russia (here marked as the freeing of the serfs). 

Soviet hand painted plate, with the center letters forming CCCP (USSR in Russian)

Wall with different items from the Soviet Era

Another exhibit was about a train line made through Siberia during the Soviet Union. Amusingly it's acronym is BAM (Baikal-Amur Mainline).

A pin from Georgia, during the first World War, of St George

Near the museum, closer to the river, is a stone taken from a gulag in Siberia. It is called the Slovetsky stone, and around the base is a quote from the poet Anna Akhmatova, famous for writing poetry about life under Stalin. The quote translates, "I wish to call them all by name, but..."

Matt took his last epic walk at the same time that I played an epic board game with a friend and his family. The game is based around the stories of Lovecraft and took four hours to play. Matt walked out to this church, the St Sampson Cathedral, in the same amount of time. :-P 

We went to see the bridges being raised for the first time since we moved to St Petersburg as well. In the summer the bridges will open to let ships pass through the Neva. It happens late at night (in this case at 1 am) but it was a lovely night for us to go!

After all of this we finally flew out on June 23rd. We took 4 bags (all of which were overweight and one of them very much so) and friends of ours drove us to the airport. Another friend was there so we could give someone the keys and having people around made it easier to leave the apartment. 

The last week or so was a lot of packing and weeding out and throwing away. We gave piles and piles of clothes away to Salvation Army! We did know who would be moving in after us though so we were able to leave a lot of things behind and did not have to empty out the apartment, a huge blessing. 

We were very blessed in our flights and especially regarding our baggage. Our flight had been changed by the airline a few times and because of this we flew to Finland (one hour mini-flight) and then on to Iceland. The Finnish flight did not charge a cent for any of our numerous and very heavy bags since the flight was through Iceland Air. We were obviously very excited about this!

Our flights over all went well on day one. Matthew became ill on one flight but fortunately we had half a day in Reykjavik. Another blessing was that our bags were checked through to Boston, so when we got to Iceland we didn't have to worry about any baggage! It was a lot of fun to see Reykjavik, though most of their tourism is the natural formations and outdoors activities. 

The city from a hill along the shore

Matt :-)

Me with an abstract Viking ship (a lot of what we know about the Vikings come from Iceland)

Gorgeous Lutheran church, the largest in Iceland and named after a poet who wrote the Passion Hymns (called Hallgrimskirkja)

The back

The area the church is located in is called the Neighbourhood of the Gods and the sign explains how the stress in this central area are all named after gods in the Norse myths. The intersections of the streets are also planned to match the relationship between the characters. 

After our short jaunt in Iceland we were off again and arrived healthily in Boston. There we went through customs and rechecked our bags. Again, we had a lot of bags and they were all overweight. The man at the counter was trying to negotiate with us to save us money but we told him we were moving and there was nothing we could do. In the end he didn't charge us for some of the expenses and saved us quite a lot of money. Another huge blessing! 

We were supposed to fly into Chicago but a storm hit just as we arrived there, so we were rerouted to Milwaukee. Finally we arrived and Matt's parents and brother were there to meet us! 

Thank you everyone who prayed for us and our return to the United States. We were blessed in how smoothly things went and how simple things were where they could have become very complicated.