Out and about in Seoul

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Judy

We really only had a day in Seoul because of the delay in leaving Russia. It was a pity as we had been looking forward to spending a few days there and exploring some of the city, and Greg had been hoping that we could get up to the DMZ. I think we managed to make the most of our one day, though.

We stayed at Itaewon, which is the nightclub area of Seoul – lots of restaurants, bars, clubs and street food. We arrived on Friday evening and it was very busy, noisy and colourful. The next morning it wasn’t quite as busy, but still full of life, with lots of things to look at and interesting places to explore. We walked down to the river via some side streets, calling into a supermarket on the way for a browse and a cold drink. It was hot and humid and we needed to go back to the air conditioned apartment for a rest after that! And that was how we spent the rest of the day – go off and do something, ,then head back for another rest. It takes a while to get used to humid weather.

We visited the War Memorial of Korea in the afternoon – a very impressive outdoor display of planes, tanks, weapons and other memorabilia, with exhibits, artwork and sculptures. It was well worth visiting and we could have spent longer there, or gone back to see more if we’d had more time. We caught the subway back to the apartment and thought it was very efficient, fast and cheap, it reminded us a lot of the Singapore metro system. We were interested to note that the subway stations are a long way underground and designated as shelters in the event of …. you know what I’m talking about.

Later on, we got back on the subway and went to Myeongdong, which is described as a ‘hyper-shopping area’. Oh yes indeed. Streets and streets of neon-lit shops, and people, and street food, and noise. Mostly women’s fashion, cosmetics and beauty products. It was good to see it at night when it was a bit cooler, and the streets were all lit up.

We had walked past a Korean BBQ place just near the apartment we stayed at. I forgot to find out if it had an English name, but it is opposite the school on Usadan-ro and whenever we went past it was full of people. Even this morning when we went past on our way to catch the airport bus, there were people there. So we ate there and it was great! Plenty of food, cold beers and a helpful waitress who must have realised we didn’t know what we were doing, so she took over and cooked our meat for us.

It was a good last day of our holidays, and Seoul is now on our list of ‘want to go back to’ places.

A Russian T-34 tank used in the Korean War at the War memorial

Sunset in Seoul

One of the many packed shopping streets at Myeongdong on a Saturday night

cooking at the Korean BBQ

Out and about in St Petersburg

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Judy

We arrived in Moscow yesterday morning, but before we start sharing our adventures here, I want to write about our last full day in St Petersburg before I forget what we did and where we went.

Greg wrote about visiting the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in his last post. We took the subway there and back and oh my gosh the subway is a long way underground. It must be halfway to China, or maybe even Australia. When we stood at the top of the escalator going down, it was impossible to see people getting off at the other end, that’s how long it was.

We had lunch at the shopping centre near the Akademicheskaya metro station (filled pancakes from a Teremok fast food place, and I tried Kvass, which I thought was a fruit drink with mint and is actually a fermented rye bread drink. There’s another drink made with cranberries but I can’t remember its name. Will look for it and try it when I find it), then we caught the metro back to Nevsky Prospekt and did the Lonely Planet’s recommended walking tour, which took us along some of the many canals and past more fascinating buildings between Nevsky and the river.

Starting off at the magnificent Singer Building, which now has a large bookshop and cafe (and probably no sewing machines!), we nipped into the bookshop for a quick browse. I found a full set of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks plus a few of Gordon Ramsay’s in Cyrillic, and most surprisingly, a Cyrillic language version of Bourke Street Bakery, which is a Sydney-based bakery. I sell the English language version. We wandered along one of St Petersburg’s many canals to the magnificent Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, where Alexander ll was blown up by a terrorist group in the 1880s hence its catchy name. Greg reckons there’s a bouncy castle in the highest cupola, but we didn’t go inside to check. We kept on walking along canals, past the now-ruined Court Stables and Pushkin’s last home, now a museum. We saw 4 of 5 bridal parties while we walked – Friday afternoon must be wedding time in Russia.

We wandered along a canal by the side of part of the Hermitage Museum to the Bolshaya Neva River, then along the back of the museum to the Alexander Column and the large square at the front of the museum. Crossing Nevsky Pr, we wandered through some side streets to the Faberge building which is still a jewellers but sadly there were no eggs anywhere. We caught a trolley bus just around the corner from the Hotel Astoria and I caught a glimpse of No 13 Malaya Morskaya, where Tchaikovsky died in 1893.

Greg went to the railway station to buy a luggage trolley for our still-enormous duffel bag – we’re hanging on to a few things we think we may need when we’re at Lake Baikal for a few days in the middle of our Trans-Siberian train trip. We had dinner at one of the many Coffee House cafes near Nevsky Pr – they seem to be Russia’s answer to Starbucks (which are also here, but not as common). A young waitress practised her English with us. It was … okay, she told us she had done a 7-day course.

the Singer Building – now bookstore

wrought iron gates

Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Greg

The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery is a monument to the Leningrad siege and contains the graves of 500,000 people.

We found a post on trip advisor that gave directions to the cemetery. So we took the metro (our first time, up to then we had used buses) and headed north. We emerged from the Metro to find ourselves in suburban Saint Petersburg. We then found the right minibus, paid our money and hoped that the driver would drop us off to the right place. Due to some mistranslation of Cyrillic he dropped us off past the memorial and we had to walk back about 1 km,

There were not many people at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, It is surprising as it is the most important event in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) history. The siege of Leningrad by the German Army and the Finns started in January 1941 and lasted 872 days. Approximately 1.5 million inhabitants died from starvation, and the bombardment by the German Army. 500,000 of those who died are buried in mass graves at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery. Compare this with UK and USA deaths in World War 2 which totalled 800,000.

It is a very moving place.

Just some of the many mass graves at Piskariovskoye. Each are marked by the year they are from.

Some of the Individual graves, with names and year of death

How to get there:

We got instructions from Trip Advisor, these are the slightly amended instructions-

Take the Red Line (#1) subway to the Akademicheskaya stop on the north side of town (28 Rubles) . Exiting the metro go straight across the plaza, cross the side street (to the right that runs between the metro plaza and the shopping centre) and look for an appropriate bus. Take either a private bus K172 (Mini bus 35 Rubles) or 178 (25 Rubles) to the memorial. Just pay the driver the Mini-bus (K172) the 35 rubles , On the way back, there is bus stop directly in front of the memorial. You will be let off across the main street from the subway. If there is no conductor on the 178 bus pay the 25 rubles to the driver (just put the money on a tray through the little window near the driver) when you LEAVE the bus.

the name of the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Cyrillic. If you can copy this to your phone you can show it to the bus driver.

the route the K178 bus takes from the Metro to the Cemetery, the bus continues on past the cemetery.

the route the K172/ 178 bus takes from the Metro to the Cemetery, the bus continues on past the cemetery.

Saint Petersburg

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Judy

Well, we’re not in Scandinavia any more, and I’m not sure what is the most confronting – the masses of people everywhere, the huge volume of traffic, the scammers, the almost total absence spoken and written English language or the strange (Cyrillic) script. The most obvious is the Cyrillic script. In countries that use the Latin alphabet, I can usually have a go at working out what’s written, but not here. We’re staying just off Nevsky Prospekt, the main historical (and touristy) part of St Petersburg, and there are bits and pieces of written English around, and we haven’t got hopelessly lost or ordered the wrong thing off a menu …. yet!

We got into St Petersburg airport late on Tuesday evening and I made the stupid mistake of assuming the guy standing next to one of the official taxi booths was a taxi driver. Well, he had a Taxi ID card around his neck and a Taxi sign on his car …so he drove us to the address we had for the hotel we’d booked and then demanded 4 times the official fare. A bit of back and forth – he refused to let us get our bags, we refused close the car door and wouldn’t pay him any more money. He eventually gave up, let Greg grab the bags while I waited in the car, then he jumped out, grabbed his magnetic Taxi sign off the car roof, ripped the home-made Taxi card from around his neck and zoomed off. At least he did drive us to where we wanted to go. But then the real fun began. The hotel’s address was Apartment 65, 136 Nevsky Prospekt. We had the right number, but where the hell was Apartment 65? We wandered up and down the street for a while, hoping it would magically appear. A young man coming out of a nearby shop asked us if we needed help – why, yes we did! He was from Siberia, but was visiting a friend who lived locally and they took us down a long courtyard/lane to the street behind NevskyPr, into another courtyard and showed us where to ring the bell for the hotel. We would probably still be hunting around, 2 days later, if those young people hadn’t helped us.

So, we’re staying down one end of Nevsky Prospekt, and at the other end of the road is the Hermitage Museum, almost 4kms away. In between is one of the main railway stations, quite a few monuments and places of historical interest and many grand-looking buildings which have shops on the lower and ground floors, and then either more shops or apartments on the upper floors. A century ago, NevskyPr was a long, wide boulevarde, and those grand-looking buildings were huge private residences. I can imagine horse-drawn carriages and the well-heeled classes of Petrograd promenading along to the theatre or to an audience with the last Tsar in his Winter Palace, which is now part of the Hermitage.

We went to the railway station to organise our train tickets to Moscow (fast train on Saturday morning), then continued walking up NevskyPr, marvelling that even the McDonalds, Subway and Burger King signs are in Cyrillic. There is a lovely small park with a statue of Catherine the Great, and the flower beds are at their best at the moment – floral designs planted out with begonias, verbena and other bedding plants. The National Library is next door, but it didn’t seem to be open to the public.

We wandered off Nevsky in search of lunch and found a little cafe that had a selection of hot dishes keeping warm behind glass. We hung back to work out how to order, then as luck would have it the customer before us ordered what we wanted (shaslick and potatoes) so we just made gestures that we’d have what he was having. It came with cold cucumber soup, salad and a cup of hot water with 2 sugar cubes. It all tasted good and we were feeling pretty happy that we had successfully ordered our first meal in Russia when I got stung by a wasp that had somehow crawled down the back of my t-shirt. Ouch! I wasn’t really feeling up to much more sightseeing after that, so we hopped on a trolley-bus back to the hotel, calling into a nearby supermarket for a packet of frozen peas (to use as an ice pack on my wasp sting) and some medicinal beers.

Later on, we went and ordered pizzas from a little place near the hotel, and more beers. The local water has traces of giardia in it so we’re drinking and cleaning our teeth in bottled water. And drinking bottled beer!

McRussian – McDonalds on Nevsky Prospect

Nevsky prospect

Catching a Trolley-Bus on Nevsky prospect. The Trolley Buses get power from overhead electric lines

Out and about in Riga

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Judy

We spent one night in Riga on our way to St Petersburg because it was the cheapest and the most interesting way of getting there, and a chance for us to visit one more country. We stayed at the Monte Kristo Hotel, which is just on the edge of Old Town Riga, and as we discovered, very close to the local bus that goes to the airport. We got a room that was advertised as having no window, which was fine with us – we were arriving late at night and weren’t planning on spending much time there. There seemed to be a neon sign right outside our room, but in the light of day (yep, pun intended), we realised it was a fluorescent light in a fake window, and the only way to turn it off was to take the room key out of the activator, which of course turned everything else in the room off as well. Very strange. Still, the room was comfortable, the breakfast was good and the reception staff very kindly let us leave our stuff at the hotel until we were ready to go out to the airport.

It was raining when we left the hotel, and it rained a couple more times during the day. In between the rain, the sun shone and it was warm and humid. We walked around Old Town for a while, then went to the newer part of the city and wandered across the river to look at the magnificent new National Library of Latvia. It’s not finished yet, but from the outside it’s a very impressive building. I had known about the city’s central market, but wasn’t sure where it was, so it was a nice surprise to find it back on the city side of the river. It’s huge! We went into the wet market first, with a whole hall full of fresh, smoked and dried seafood, then into the meat and smallgoods hall, a partly empty fruit and vegetable section, then outside to see lots more fresh food stalls. So many stalls, so much excellent produce at really cheap prices. We only had enough cash to get us back out to the airport on the local bus, so we couldn’t buy anything … which was probably just as well.

We headed to a large shopping centre to find some lunch at a sit-down restaurant that took credit cards – the above-mentioned no-cash problem, and we wanted to kill some time. The shopping centre was mostly full of womens’ clothes shops (just like at home), but we found an Italian restaurant and settled in for the afternoon. Even so, we got out to the airport either way too early or in plenty of time, depending on how much pre-flight time your internal clock needs before boarding a plane.

It was a good day,and probably a good buffer for us to start making the transition from friendly, English-speaking Sweden to mildly scary non-English speaking St Petersburg, which I’ll write about soon.

Out and About in Helsinki

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Judy

We are staying in Espoo, home of Nokia and the second-largest city in Finland. It’s actually just an extension of Helsinki. We are staying in another Airbnb apartment and you can have a little look at it here. Nice 1 bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of a 4-storey apartment building, bus outside the door, shops and railway station about 10 minutes walk away. We’re here for 5 nights and will put the car and ourselves on the ferry back to Stockholm on Saturday night.

We decided to go into the city and have a look around today. It was overcast this morning but the forecast was for a fine day with temps in the low 20s. That’s double the maximum temperatures we had while we were within the Arctic Circle!

So … even though there’s a bus outside the door, we walked up to the nearest railway station and dithered around for a while working out where we were headed and how much it would cost. As Espoo is in Zone 3 of the local train network it was going to cost us 4.5 euros each. So we thought it might be cheaper on the bus and headed to the nearest bus stop where we boarded a bus and paid …. 4.5 euros each. Okay, so now we have all that worked out. We’re going to Tallin, in Estonia, tomorrow for the day and we wanted to check where the ferry leaves. The ferry terminal just happens to be near an open air market that I wanted to visit, so that was all rather good planning, or luck.

The market stalls are all selling berries, currants, cherries, peas and new potatoes at the moment so we bought some little new potatoes and peas still in their pod for dinner and strawberries and raspberries as well. I was interested to see that fruit and vegetables are sold by volume here, so I bought a litre each of peas, potatoes and strawberries, and the raspberries were already in a punnet. There were also a lot of stalls selling cooked food, with little tables and chairs set up. We went to a seafood stall close to the water where Greg had whitebait, fried potatoes, vegetables and salad, and I had prawns, fried potatoes etc. All freshly cooked, all delicious.

We wandered around to the ferry terminal and collected our tickets to Tallin, then did a modified walking tour of the main points of interest in Helsinki – the Lutheran Cathedral, the National Library which is currently closed for renovation, Pohoisesplanadi – Helsinki’s equivalent of the Champs Elysee and the highlight of our walk - Temppeliaukio Kirrko (The Church of the Rock), a 1960s church hewn into solid rock. A really simple but magnificent space, with a glass and copper dome and a beautiful organ. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any photos, but if you click on the link above there are some good photos with the Wikipedia article.

We caught a train back to the apartment, partly so that we could experience the full gamut of Helsinki public transport, but also because we couldn’t work out where the heck to catch the bus back out to the suburbs!

Buying fruit at the market

More market stalls in Helsinki

Its not a disease! The common name for Street food vans everywhere but Australia

Wandering around Oslo

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Judy

We got brave and caught a bus into the city centre this morning. In every country we’ve ever visited, we have managed to navigate our way around the train or subway system without too much trouble, but have been wary of catching buses because we don’t know where we’ll end up. However the apartment we’re staying in is not close to a train station, and the bus is right outside the front door. Buying tickets was a bit tricky – they are available from newsagents, convenience stores and automatic ticket machines for a lower price than on the bus, but we tried 2 supermarkets and a service station near the apartment and none of them sell bus tickets, so we had to buy them from the bus driver.

For $10.

Each.

On the way home we got them from a newsagent near the bus stop in town and paid $6 each.

We did some sightseeing and got some stuff done – exchanging $USD for Norwegian Krone, bought a mobile broadband modem so we can access the interwebz while we’re travelling around Norway. We visited the very modern Oslo Opera House, which is made of marble and glass, and has a very impressive timber ‘Wave Wall’ inside that provides access to the upper levels of the building. Great views of the city from the roof, which is apparently a favourite sunbaking spot on warm days. We didn’t see anyone sunbaking there today, but as we saw plenty of people out and about in the sun yesterday, the Opera House roof may have been standing-room only.

We walked up the main shopping mall and dropped into a Subway for some lunch. $20 for a foot-long roll with a drink and a biscuit. We shared, and I noticed other couples doing the same. We haven’t been sticking to our 5:2 diet where we eat just 500 – 600 calories for 2 days of the week, but we seem to just be eating less than usual anyway. I guess our bathroom scales will tell us the truth when we get home.

I had read about Litteraturhuset, the House of Literature, and it sounded like an interesting place to visit, so we walked along the side of the Royal Palace park to reach it. Not quite what I’d expected, it has a large outdoor cafe with a small bookshop inside, and apparently literature-related talks, workshops and debates are held there. Lovely old building, though, and on the way there we did find Norli, a large bookshop with a good range of English-language books and I even found a couple of cookbooks by Aussie celebrity chefs – David Thompson’s Thai Street Food and Christine Manfield’s Tasting India. Jo Nesbo’s latest book Police is prominently featured in all bookshops at the moment – hardcover Norwegian language version costs the equivalent of almost AUD$80 …. and most places have it ‘on special’ for $70.

We walked through the Royal Palace Park and went past the Royal Palace on our way back towards the city centre. The palace is undergoing renovation and the surrounding area looks like a building site. There were quite a few beggars around the shopping centres and in the shopping mall. More than we have seen in other major Scandinavian cities.

Our last stop today was Nor Brothers supermarket at Storgata 34. Our Lonely Planet guide recommended it as a good place to get reasonably priced groceries and good quality fruit and veg. And it was! Excellent bananas for $1.40 per kg, fresh bread for $2 per loaf (the cheapest we’ve seen elsewhere starts at $4), a whole room full of different rices and lots of interesting imported food. We bought a few things and plan to go back on our way out of Oslo. We realised as we were leaving that there was a whole 2nd floor that we had missed! So we have to go back.

The bus trip back to the apartment was easy and it dropped us right outside the front door to the apartment block.

We have a new mission – to find Norwegian hand-knitted sweaters in a Fretex (Salvos) shop. We’ll let you know how we go.

The Roof of the Oslo Opera House with the skyline of Oslo in the background

Timber Walls at the opera house

The Glass walls of the Opera House. The glass has no other supports, it has glass beams at right angles to give strength

Jo Nesbo’s latest book on sale in Oslo, but don’t worry its on special, normally A$80, but now a steeply discounted A$70

Norwegians in Oslo in the Royal Palace park, getting their gear off and getting some sun. Its summer, its 22C, summer might be over tomorrow!

Out and about in Copenhagen

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Judy

After our bicycle adventure yesterday, we decided to spend today, our last full day here, walking and visiting some places we had cycled past yesterday. There were a couple of things on my ‘must eat in Denmark’ list too, including smorrbrod (Danish open sandwiches), ice cream and Danish pastries, which are called ‘Vienerbrod’ Viennese Bread here.

We had ridden past Christiania on our way to Noma yesterday. It’s a hippy commune located on an abandoned 41 hectare military camp, with lots of DIY houses, a small marketplace selling everything from rainbow clothes & jewellery to hashish and dope (no photos please!). The houses range from converted shipping containers to modern timber dwellings and lots of the army buildings have been repurposed as cafes and apartment blocks. I thought there would be more evidence of self-sufficiency, but apart from one wind generator and a lovely raised-bed vegie garden, it all seemed to be kinda suburban, with electricity meters and people bringing their shopping home from the local supermarket. The commune is spread across a couple of canals, with grassy areas for people to sit, and that was lovely, like a little haven in the middle of the busy city.

We found an ice cream shop and had scoop in a waffle cone for morning tea – chocolate for Greg, hazelnut for me … *waves* to our neighbour Hazel!

Next on our list was Nyhavn, a very touristy area along a canal lined with yachts in the water, and restaurants on the waterfront. Hans Christian Anderson lived in several places along this canal. We didn’t bother about going to see the Little Mermaid because we haven’t heard or read anything that has been positive. Everyone reckons she’s too small, overrated and not worth the effort. However we did wander along to Amalienborg Slot, the royal palace where one of Australia’s most famous exports, Princess Mary, lives with her family and other members of the Danish royal family.

By then we’d seen and done as much as we wanted to, so we found a sandwich shop and had lunch. Around $15 for 2 huge filled bread rolls and a small open sandwich with egg, tomato and pieces of some kind of fish.

Eating Waffle cone ice cream in Copenhagen

A bike lane in Copenhagen. A kerb separates the bike lane from the road.

Judy outside a fellow Australians home in Copenhagen, hoping for an invite in from … Princess Mary

the lounge in our apartment in Copenhagen

Bicycles in Copenhagen

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Greg

We got to Copenhagen yesterday in the early afternoon. We had booked another apartment with airbnb and met the owners daughter at the apartment in Valby, about 3 km from the centre of Copenhagen. After checking out the shops in the local areas we headed into central Copenhagen. The next day Thursday we walked into the city and hired a cargo bike, and Judy volunteered to be the cargo. It was a nice day (about 19C) and we rode all round the centre of Copenhagen, visiting the closed because of renovations Noma restaurant (number one Michelin restaurant). The number of people riding in Copenhagen has to be seen to be believed. There are more people riding on just a few streets of Copenhagen then there is in all of Adelaide.

There is no Lycra, no cleats, no road racing bikes, no helmets, and no drop down handlebars. Ordinary people wearing ordinary clothes and ordinary shoes riding around. It is one of the safest places to ride a bicycle in the world. Adelaide South Australia is not as safe to ride in, and we have compulsory helmet laws. Bikes have baskets, carriers and more, so things can be carried on the bikes like shopping, and cargo bikes abound for carrying children around. There are great bike paths along side the road, mostly with a raised curb separating the bike path from the road.

Bikes in double level bike racks at a railway station near our apartment

The cargo bike outside our apartment. Notice the rows and rows of bikes that are parked outside every apartment building

Judy outside the closed for renovation noma restaurant

Steak for lunch in Copenhagen, all the way from the Coorong in South Australia

Tents, Trains and Tales

Judy and Gregs travels across Scandinavia and Russia

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