saturday, november 5. day 9. our last-ish day in sweden took us to the temple. so good. so beautiful. so peaceful. so wonderful. it was pretty great. it was really cool to hear everything being said in swedish and everyone there was super nice. leslie actually knew a few of the people from the ward that we did baptisms with! that was pretty cool. small world...
i love the way the church designs the temples to make the culture and area of where it's at... this temple totally looks swedish!
funny story, those ILP girls that we stayed with in moscow, we ran into them at the temple! and a grocery store after we left... they took a picture for us, and we took one for them
one of my favorite things in sweden was seeing my last name-ish everywhere. loved it :)
after the temple, we went back to the hostel to stay for the afternoon and pack, so we didn't have to pay for more ridiculously expensive things. especially transportation. as it came time to take off, we said goodbye to AJ, and headed out. we got to the ferry port super easy, a solid 2 hours early, which we were very happy about. we saw a check in counter that no one was using, but figured we should go over there anyways. when we did, we found out that our ferry tickets weren't valid. we had paid for them, but they didn't exist. we begged and pleaded and bartered to get onto that boat. we offered to sleep on the floor, do dishes, anything. but all the woman would say was i'm sorry, there's nothing i can do. we started to panic slightly, some cried, some started stress eating... good stuff. about then, the moscow girls showed up! they had real tickets to get onto the ferry though, so they left us there and wished us good luck. we started doing everything we could think of: calling our program directors at home, calling alla our native coordinator. .... we finally knew that no one could help us but ourselves and realized that we might not actually make it back to st. petersburg in time to teach. so, we came up with the best alternate plan that we could. heather called the ferry booking company we used and got our money back. and we booked a ferry that would take us to estonia the next day, and then from there we would catch the first bus possible back to st. petersburg. we went back to the hostel, and AJ laughed at us and said we were funny girls. sunday, november 6. day 10. the next day we were lazy and layed around reading, and not doing much at all. the next night we got on our ferry and headed to estonia. for the second time in less than 2 weeks....
this was our ferry, the victoria. it was big, and nice, and expensive. not a fan of the seasickness. or looking from the boat out to black nothingness. monday, november 7. day 11. we got to estonia and 10 am, and the next available bus didn't leave until midnight. sweet. so we went back to our old hostel just to hang out. again. they were really cool about just letting us chill there. then we treated ourselves to some new york pizza.
then we went to the bus station, and ran into none other than allison and bekka! their bus left like 10 minutes before ours. small world, huh? we had to go through customs to get into russia at like 4 in the morning... right after i finally fell asleep. that was lots of fun. let me tell you what.
we FINALLY got in st. petersburg tuesday morning. november 8. day 12. and had to teach only a few hours later. good times...
and that's the story of my vacation.
and that's the story of my vacation.
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