BON VOYAGE

spent my last night abroad in the helsinki airport again, and was happy to be able to sleep from midnight to six in the chilly basement lounge. there are still eight hours until takeoff, however. melissa and i woke up to the beginning of the day´s flight announcements and were sitting on the benches we have claimed as our beds when i looked down at the necklace which i have worn without removing for the entire trip; a beautiful little talisman given to me by hayley for my birthday, a small copper life preserver ring from which hangs a circular pendant engraved with a grand steamship and bearing the inscription: BON VOYAGE. it has been, this whole month, sometimes a perceived and always a subconcious reminder, a mantra, pressed close to my skin- to my heart and the core of my body. bon voyage. what a good trip indeed! i know on this last day of my journey i should say some words in reflection, but i wonder if i could even find the words to properly convey the bon-ness of this adventure? nor, for that matter, could i ever express the richness of my life: the accumulated experience of all my roamings. and now my passport if full, and now i must replace the backpack that has been so near and dear to me ever since it was purchased for my post- high school western european excursion with ginger and corina.
despite all this, bon voyage at this moment recalls another scene, a very particular scene entirely removed from the continent where i now stand: monday night sin williamsburg at black betty, listening to the reverend with his tom waits voive and his alligator shoes wailing, `bon voyage, you bastards, bon voyage!´(and we girls are singing along with everyone, raising our glasses with everyone, and secretly admiring the bassist, who also happens to be the beautiful drummer from tv on the radio....). so, i am brought simultaneously back to the past and into the future- to my life in brooklyn which i have temporarily abandoned and to which- though sad to leave these wanderings- i cannot wait to return. i look forward to returning to scenes such as this, to the shows of my own musically talented friends, to the creative energies of all my poets and artists and stylists and healers and laugers all those who know how to live at our age, in our age. in short, to my extensive new york family. to quote eliot, as usual:

you do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

and how, how rare and strange it is, to find

in a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends...

to find a friend who has these qualities,

who has, and gives

those qualiities upon which friendship lives.

how much it means that i say this to you-

without friendships- life, what cauchemar!

and yet, in my case, it can hardly be so very rare and strange, wonderful friendships being more the rule than the exception, and for that i will be eternally grateful. i am incredibly blessed with my friends, in their quality and quantity. i often feel there is no girl luckier than i, and i sometimes fear that i know too too many good, good people and there can´t possibly be room in the human heart for more, but always there is! indeed, the past few months brought a few of them to the magnet that is brooklyn and i have the arrival of three more incredible, important people to look forward to upon my return! i have waxed sentimental. pardon. just know i am so happy to come back to you! i simply can´t wait to see you!
i can´t wait for autumn- just around the corner- and the promise of scarves, and the specific contentment granted by the gradual chilling of the air and the changing and falling of leaves from trees, and the changing of all things in general. i have an entirely new life to look forward to: once again the life of a student! (and in the field to which i will, it seems, devote my life. to have a path!) i look forward to the small details of my life, such as walking home from the subway in the evenings towards the water, into the setting sun sittingly blindingly at the end of the street- the street which is filled with kids throwing balls around, the sidewalk which is crowded with younger kids zipping by on their tricycles and pogo sticks, the stoops which are crowded with older kids and adults shooting the breeze, the simultaneous sounds on a friday night of reggaeton and the sabbath siren. i look forward to our roof with its view of manhattan, our treehouse, to having a dog and my girls and wine in the evenings and brunch on the weekends and my own bed to sleep in. the first bon voyage is sadly over, but it has now become something equally amazing: the journey home. i will see you so soon.

safely made it through the russian border, a process that took just as long going into finland as coming out of it. we crossed sometime between midnight and one am, so technically i had had my cinderalla moment- i half expected to see the bus turn into a pumpkin as i myself turned into an illegal immigrant. the ice queen on the other side of the passport control window made a few phone calls and took a few minutes longer with my passport than with anyone else´s, but i was granted entry into finland in the end. after all, i was on my way out on the 30th, and what could they really do, deport me as i was crossing the border? no, it was really no trouble at all, it went just as i hoped it would. except...unfortunately, our bus was not totally overnight...we got in around 3am, so we slept on some benches in the helsinki airport and now are drinking overpriced coffee and about to go into helsinki for the day, our last day abroad. someone just passed by me and said ´boy, that was a fast two weeks!´if only they knew that a month in a way can be even quicker....

from russia with love

this is the final day in saint petersburg. tonight we take an overnight bus back to helsinki for a day, and then back to dear, dear new york city. this morning after breakfast we said goodbye to masha and her mom, which was very hard. they gave us a russian skirt and scarf by which to remember them. today we are catching up on all the last minute sights we have not yet seen in this beautiful city of too many things to be seen. yesterday we wandered around the ruins in the gardens of pushkin palace, deciding for money's sake not to enter the magnificent palace itself (one sees enough of decandent interiors in the hermitage to last a long time). i found it slightly more charming with its crumbling buildings and wide expanses of long, slightly unkempt grass under big black trees than the manicured lawns of peterhoff (though they had their neglected areas as well), particularly so because we were exploring them with masha. the previous night, we met up woth some of her friends and walked around in the rain along the river for a long time. finally we ended up at the apartment of one of them and had opened many bottles of wine and made a huge feast of mostly sausages and other meats and passed the time into the wee hours with a guitar and a mouth harp and a violin and many russian songs, the most memorable involving a horse who carries the singer's lover away. we were able to crawl out the window onto the scaffolding surrounding the building and get a magnificent view of the city, then we all went to bed on various beds and couches and patches of floor. i am in a post office at the moment and have to run to go do many things. let us hope that i have no issues crossing the border, as the bus may cross into finland after midnight and my visa is good only through the 30th. weeee!

there is soooo much to say and i haven't been keeping up with this! let me see if i can say it all as briefly as possible. first of all, i am writing from the hermitage museum in saint petersburg, a museum to rival the louvre. we've been here for many hours- the perfect rainy day activity- and every day has been rainy and cool (but last night, when the clouds cleared for a spell, it felt distinctly autumnish, oh joy). yesterdy we saw peterhof palace (this is where one finds all those golden fountains you always see in pictures of st. P) and the day before that we saw the church of the saviour of the spilled blood (st petersburg's one moscow style onion-domed cathedral, covered floor to ceiling inside with splendid mosaics) and we've probably spent as much time or more riding or getting lost on public transportation, trying to decipher cyrillic, ordering completely the wrong food (feeling like big bird lost in tokyo), and dealing with the general headache of being a foreigner in russia. it is incredibly, amazingly beautiful here, however, and i am loving it.
we are couchsurfing with a girl our age named maria (masha) who is a celltologist and her mom tamara who speaks no english in their small, old soviet flat in a little suburb about forty minutes outside st petersburg by mashrutka (minibus with a fixed route but without fixed stops, so that you can exit wherever you'd like). all the pipes in the area are dug up fro reconstruction, so the neighborhood looks like one big excavation site. needless to say, there is no hot water, but there is always a pot on the stove waiting to be turned into tea or mixed with cold water for a bucket bath. they give us their sofa, and soup and bread and pickles and tea, and in the morning muesli and yogurt, and they give us so much more than that...a real sweet pair they are. last night we all watched jesus christ superstar together, after they welcomed us with open arms of thankfulness when we finally arrived home later that we had planned. this is why couchsurfing is the best thing on earth.
ok, sorry this post sucks. i hope to be able to write more ( and better) later!

in case inquiring minds would like to know, i've made it safely to the most beautiful city in the largest country in the world (or so everyone here would like you to believe). though i remain in one piece with all my possessions, it was still a very interesting journey that needs it own chapter. in time i shall post this. for now, i am too excited to write much and despite the morning's rain i must get out into the streets of saint petersburg!!

Kiitos Suomi!

in iceland it was takk, in latvia it was paldies, in estonia it was tänan, and in russia it will be spasibo. it is perhaps the easiest and most practical word to learn in a foreign language, besides hello. in finland, it is kiitos.
so kittos, finland, thank you thank you thank you for the memories!!
it is bittersweet, now that Navetta is empty and quiet and all the cots and sheets except ours have been folded and put into the common space. i am sitting here in the kitchen drinking vanilla tea with the door open to the night and it is only crickets i hear. i went downstairs and walked through the maze of deserted printing facilities and was reminded of lonley late nights in the oberlin silkscreen studios, trying to perfect my sloppy registration and admiring the drying racks full of posters for concerts at the 'sco: blonde redhead and the like. i feel i haven't said enough about this week. our workshop was great, the perfect pace. we worked a lot- we were always working- yet it was easygoing and flexible. we played with light in the woods and the lake and in a beautiful mansion and an attic. it was a small class: there were ole and henry, two dutch boys of grad school age, and there was middle-aged oldrich from czech republic (but living in imatra with his finnish girlfriend who worked at the school next door). also living in imatra was laura who just finished her first year at the very same school where we had our workshop, and esko, a delightful old finn who spoke hardly any english and who must have felt so out of place taking part in a workshop conducted in a language of which he has only the most basic knowledge...an outsider in his own city. yet he made such an effort today during our final critique, and he was so sincere. he had prepared some kind words and translated them and written them down to let us know how happy he was to have participated in the program. then there's melissa and myself, the two american girls ('you came all the way from america?! why?´ to which i say, 'why not?') and of course also jan pohribny, whom i have admired since i took his class in prague. we all left with very warm feelings, a bunch of decent photographs, and some knowledge and experience we didn't have on arrival.
paivi, another photo teacher, has arranged for some woman to drive us early tomorrow morning across the russian border where we can catch a much cheaper train to st petersburg after spending some hours in a small town. the anticipation is building, and i fear i won't be able to sleep from excitement, like a kid on christmas eve. the contrast will be great from this little city- this little town- to that grand city, which contains probably as many people as in all of finland.
finland for me will from now on be mushrooms and black lakes and suanas, instant coffee and bulk candy and tall trees, a perpetual train taking car after car of felled birch trees to russia and a perpetual truck taking luxury car after car there as well, people power-walking with ski poles and washing their cars and their rugs at the edge of the river, and of course it will be painting with light.
i will take with me a wooden toy boat found in the woods and a woolen sweater found in the free box of our hostel on the lake and also a bit of a cold. i will leave here my baltic states lonely planet and my travel tripod lost in the shuffle and also my two final prints from the workshop.
it is midnight and i must pack.