Birthday

Like 28 years ago my birthday fell on a Sunday this year and I had a great birthday party in my appartment! I'm really, really flattered about the crowd of people who showed up and made this a wonderful party! I got extremely thoughtful presents, cards and emails, and can't say often enough, "THANK YOU!!!".

Happy Birthday!!!
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Paddy from Ireland, currently AIESEC trainee in Moscow arrived with the overnight train on Saturday morning and didn't know that he wasn't going to get much sleep over the weekend ;-) The party on Saturday was meant to start as Pawel's (CEEDer from Poland) welcome party and turn into my birthday party at some point. Pawel and I bought as much food as we could possibly carry home and EVERYTHING mysteriously disappeared until the next morning. For example, there were at least 10 bananas around and all gone in the morning, but Pawel, Paddy and I never saw anyone eating a banana... I have to admit that my perception was clearly blurred after some time...


Paddy


Tyoma


Pawel and the Polish vodka


Natalia and Yuan on the balcony


My buddy Masha


Zhenya


Ziba


Lesha ("a lover, not a hater" as Paddy correctly observed) and Tania

Public transport stops working in St. Petersburg at midnight, so I had offered everyone to stay overnight. Those who decided to stay, including me :-), started playing a dreadful drinking game called "sink the Bismarck" (John, the US citizen introduced the game to us)... and it finally finished me! I woke up in the morning, distrubed by some really noisy snores next to me. The first thing that occurred to me after my brain started working was, "I'm in bed, how did I get here???" and then I turned around to find out what that noise was and thought, "and what on earth is Lesha doing next to me?". On the floor were 5 more guys, being eaten by about 60 mosquitos... Besides the headache and an uncomfy feeling in my stomach area it was cool. I mean, who wakes up on her 28th birthday surrounded by 6 cute, young guys??? :-)
It turned out that I had fallen asleep on the couch around 2am and they had put me into bed shortly afterwards. Lesha fell asleep shortly after me, and to get him out of their way while playing more drinking games, they placed Lesha next to me on the WIDE couch!


Sergey


sink the "Bismarck"...


and the Bismarck is sinking...


Birthday presents!!!


The crowd watching Pawel's presentation


The Bismarck sank...


from the left: John, Pawel, Ania V., Tyoma, Masha, Tania, Lisa, Yuan, Lesha, Natalia, Sergey, Boris and ?, missing are Zhenya, Paddy and Ziba

We had some breakfast (well... everything that was left) and spent several hours recovering from hangovers. Around 2pm Paddy, Pawel and I set off to Hermitage and a lovely boat trip on the Newa and through the channels! Ignoring the slight headache, it came close to a perfect birthday!

I got to host Paddy and Pawel for another night and "granny" (as those two 20 years olds call me) moved to the floor. Unfortunately we had not been able to catch all the mosquitos and Paddy and I spent more than 1 hour killing mosquitos till 2am in the morning. Pawel, however, slept rather well. But you should have seen his startled look when he woke up during the night and saw Paddy and me standing on chairs and tables, killing mosquitos on the ceiling :-)))


Paddy and Pawel staring at the mosquitos


Birthday presents


Boat trip on July 24th


And the most beautiful sunset...

Swimming

There is that cat high up on a building on Nevski Prospekt and that bird at one of the channels where you can try to throw and land a coin and make a wish, and whereever you see some golden spot on a monument you can touch it and also make a wish. And guess what: It works :-) But it is like in the parabel with the guy on the roof during the Flood... The guy is really religious and believes that God will save him. A boat passes and wants to help him, but he says, "No, thanks, God will save me". This happens two more times before the water reaches the roof and the guy drowns... Up in heaven he complains that God didn't save him and God says, "I sent you three boats! Why didn't you get into one of them?"
However, I finally got to go swimming this summer!!! Yay! And according to friends, my skin looks "tasty" now! I had lots of fun playing in the water and you wouldn't believe what those AIESECers did...

On Sunday Sergey and his girlfriend Ania took Yuan, Pawel from Poland and me to Pushkin, to the really nice park a bit outside of Piter. We had a great time taking funny pictures which I prefer not to upload here :-)

My Monday started off rather stressful though... I had not realized that I was supposed to be in the office at 9am and walked calmly in at 10am... Furthermore, I had not noticed that my phone was blocked due to low credit and so the sms from my boss didn't get through... Then it turned out that my internet wasn't working and my boss got really nervous about the reports that were due, so I had to work at someone else's computer - the poor person was not happy about that at all. Anyway, there are not many things which can my cheerful mood today!


Relaxing at a lake - finally summer!
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Having a time-out on the lake :-)


The ex-LCP, the LCP and another important AIESEC member...


Anna buried in the sand...


Waiting for the bus to go back: Oleg, Lesha, Tyoma, Vitja and Pawel


LCP Lesha and Tyoma


Ex-LCP Vitja


Sergey, Tania and Lesha


Pushkin


Anna at Pushkin


Sunday at Pushkin


Yay!

More pics

I went on a wonderful night sightseeing tour on Tuesday night and got to watch all the bridges opening! Unfortunately I arrived back home only at 6:45am and had to get up at 8:15am again...
However, the city is sooooo beautiful!!!


Night Sightseeing Tour
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The bridges open...


The beautiful bridges in Piter


Kanal Griboedova


Gulf of Finland


Hermitage and St. Isaac's Cathedral


Kunstkamera and Peter and Paul Fortress


Anna and the Sphinx


On the Newa


The Riverside at 10pm...

Vyborg

Another exciting week has passed: Going to the beach after work, meeting my old flat mate and his now roomie, hanging out with my colleagues after work, going to Datcha a few times and to the ballet to watch "Swan lake" were very enjoyable!

Schwanensee

I have adapted so well to life in St. Petersburg that I felt it was time to show it physically :-) So, on Saturday the mission was to find a good and cheap hairdresser! Yuan, this really nice guy from China, was a great help when it came to deal with "Russian services". Russian understanding of running a business is slightly different from common Western thinking. In Russia you have to be thankful if the sales woman in a shop does not yell at you, because you disturbed her conversation with her friends... There are exceptions of course, and we finally found a nice "salon" where I spent 3 hours (being the only client) getting my hair done. They were amazingly friendly and Yuan managed to negotiate a good price for me!

On Sunday we went to Выборг (Vyborg), which is about 150km away from St. Petersburg and very close to Finland. It was a perfect summer day and a Sunday how a Sunday is supposed to be! We didn't mind the 6 hours on the train... It is RUSSIA! The 3 hours back certainly were a Russian experience, because EVERYBODY seemed to have left the city over the weekend and wanted to take our very train back home. People simply didn't fit in and there was a lot of aggression between some of the travellers. I got home safe and sound, warmly welcomed by a hungry cat :-)


Über den Dächern von Выборг
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Vyborg seems very European


View from Vyborg Castle to the Finland Bay


Having fun.... ;-)


Water lilies everywhere!


We rented this lovely thingy and discovered one miracle after another


Left alone on a rock... :-(


Sun, blue sky and blue water! What else you want on a Sunday? :-)


Der Franzensbaum


Tired on the way home (3h by train - normal in Russia)