That afternoon we took a bus ride to Vyborg. The details of which are to come.
However, I got a phone call late last night to speak in church tomorrow, so that's what I'm spending my time on.
(Continued)
We found our way to the bus station and bought our tickets to Vyborg, an area where James served for 2 months. It was approximately 90 miles away as the bird flies, or 2 hours on the bus.
On this map, Vyborg is in the upper left hand corner, right on the inlet.We had a little time before the bus left and it was lunchtime, so we decided to see what we could find. Not too far was a clean and kept-up little restaurant. Since James had lived through a shaverma a couple days previous, I thought it must be okay. A shaverma is shaved meat topped with a sort of salad and doused in sauce, wrapped up in something like a tortilla. Since the international travel nurse had strictly warned us about lettuce, I just asked that they leave off the salad on mine. It was warm and fairly tasty except for a little gristle now an then. Little did we know that a couple days later we would see the following in a travel brochure we picked up at the hotel.
That skewer in the back of the picture has the layered meat on it from which they carve. Since you can't read the fine print under the title, "Food poisoning anyone?" Let me enlighten you. It reads, "Would you like some dog meat with that river of limp lettuce and garlic sauce sir? The shaverma or doner kebab is one of the riskiest things you can eat in Russia...or Eastern Europe...We'd like to say that we know a good place where you can eat a shaverma, but we don't---because there aren't any. This is one only for those with a stomach of steel." Needless to say, we didn't eat anymore of James's 'mission favorite'.
Riding on the bus out of Vyborg was the first land travel of our trip outside the city. We were floored when we saw an IKEA!
We found the church building fairly easily since it was there when James was serving. It was the first building built by the church in the former Soviet Union.
We had a wonderful reunion with the branch members. One of them had brought a VHS tape of his wedding reception which had taken place at the building when James was serving. It was so much fun to see footage of the time and place when James was serving. He looked like this:
(If I didn't know better I would guess a "deacon" or a maybe a "teacher" but definitely not an "elder.") One of the sisters in the branch has three sons that had all served on missions!
(She's the second from the left.)Again, I'll have to finish later. One thing that jet lag did for me on the way home was make me get in bad earlier. I'm determined to keep it up.
(Continued again...)
After we met with the branch members we had a short while until we needed to catch the bus back to St. Pete. We walked the hilly cobblestone roads
to this:
They were putting on some sort of mid-evil festival but they were just finishing for the day and we probably wouldn't have had enough time anyway.
We had already realized our foolishness in that we should have bought a departing ticket right when we arrived. I started watching for hotels in case the worst case scenario panned out. When we got to the bus station our
fears were confirmed. The return tickets were sold out. We had no idea when the last train left for the evening so we literally started running in the direction people pointed when we asked where the train station was. We kept asking and kept running. When we finally got to the train station we asked the lady at the window and she said she only had one ticket left. Oh no! She pointed to another window and we didn't know why another window would be any different, but we asked there anyway. She sold us two tickets. We later realized that it was a more expensive train (instead of wooden bench seats, it had bucket seats) but we were just very grateful to be headed back to our hotel for the night.
VERY happy to have tickets.On the way we were able to see the open country as the sun set. It is fascinating to me to imagine the lives that go on in those remote villages.
It took a little longer, but was actually a treat to ride through the countryside.
We were grateful to arrive back in St. Petersburg and celebrated with an ice cream bar (we at a lot of them) as we walked back to our hotel on the crowded and lively streets of the night life on a weekend in a big city.
Approximate total miles traveled: 7158
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