From Russia with love (Timo)

Dragonbane Diary
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
Rovaniemi (Finland) - Murmansk - St Petersburg (Russia)

On Friday I had very busy IRL (in real life, editor's remark) work day, but in the evening hours I was sitting in airport waiting for some hours for the plane to St Petersburg to arrive. On the plane I couldn't stop wondering why I need to fly from Rovaniemi in the north of Finland first to Helsinki then to St Petersburg to reach Murmansk (only ~350 km from 'home').

At some very late hour I finally ended up in St Petersburg, where I was supposed to spend 20h just waiting for my connection flight to Murmansk. The weather was really arctic in St Petersburg. My beard froze in 30 seconds or so when I walked to find a restaurant. The humidity made the -26 degrees celcius very biting and then came the wind ...

Saturday. The morning started with a good selection of strange stuff to eat. Pickled meatballs, pancakes with sourcream and syrup and vodka shrimps to name few of the oddest. The hotel restaurant was so cold that I had to wear my winter jacket and eat fast not to get frozen solid. After the nourishing breakfast I headed to the local naval history museum, as I didn't intend to do 12 hours of Dragonbane work, or real work, again. The museum had only information in Russian. So much for that, then. As there're virtually no internet cafe's, GPRS in Russia is very expensive and GPRS roaming doesn't generally work, I decided that offline working could do.

I headed to a restaurant (the ONLY certainly warm place, where you could sit and write). Three-four hours and four cups of tea later I had cleaned most of my todo list. And not a single phonecall ;)

Then to Pulkova airport. The taximan and I tried to find an internet cafe. None found. He has a GPRS enabled phone. It naturally doesn't work with my laptop, no matter what you do. I decide to pay the huge bill and use my Finnish GPRS only to find that Telefinland roaming doesn't cover Russia. *whoah*

At the municipal airport I have loads of time and start writing again only to notice that there is a WLAN hotspot. Gee! After a moment of pondering I find the instructions of usage. "Send SMS to certain number if you have Russian phone. Call to operator if you don't have Russian phone." How would I know what the operator number is? A bit more tuning and I found more details. 10 minutes later I had 5MB at 11MBps at the modest price of 2€.

Two hours in a fully stuffed airplane. Even if the plane itself isn't exactly from today, the catering beats almost any western company. By midnight I find myself in a hotelroom in Murmansk. The weather is less icy than the St Petersburg I left and I'm on a shore of arctic sea. No wonder ...

To my great surprise the hotel in Murmansk looks rather new and I dare to ask whether they know any internet cafes. They proudly tell that all hotel rooms INCLUDE an internet connection if you have your laptop. I told them I do. They got me a cable and an instruction set in english. In my hotel room I took a closer look. The room is small, with a toilet from II World War, but it had working internet ... via dial-up. The dial-up worked rather reliably and thus I did long hours of work and Dragonbane.

Sunday. I missed breakfast. Went to the partner location. No network on Sunday. Back to hotel to connect inet only to find out that the dial up costs ~10€/h... Dinner at a good restaurant and then back online, no matter of the price, things needed to be done.

Monday. Having spent a largish part of the night at my hotel room doing Dragonbane background materials and IRL work, I felt somewhat sleepy. The days negotiations were tough, but I got access to the partner's LAN. 200 persons behind seemingly single ISDN and with strict quota limits. Between sending my mails I had to have a tea-break for my quota to zero. Having missed lunch, dinner and everything else related, I headed to my hotel restaurant. No others are within reasonable distance. Live piano music, kitch-design, too much service personnel, very odd environment to write Witch movie script, costume design queries to India and other similar stuff.

Tomorrow before God wakes up, it's time for the ~12 hour journey to Helsinki. Hope to be back in civilization soon.

Timo Multamäki