That One Time I Thought I was going to Become a Sister Wife aka That One Time I Caught Neck Hepatitis aka My Trip To Saint Petersburg... COVERED IN OWLS. (Part 1)

So I went to Saint Petersburg. And I came back. The fact that I came back seems like it is trivial information to give, but believe me, I'm having a VERY hard time believing that I came back with only minimal psychological damage.  In case you are unaware...like I was... the train to Saint Petersburg can be as long as 17 hours. This is not because it actually takes 17 hours to get there. Actually, I don't know that I could tell you why it takes 17 hours. Our train went about as fast as a bicycle and stopped every half hour for no apparent reason other than just to take a break from moving.  But this was nothing compared to where we had to sleep on the train. Since it was such a long train ride, the train was equipped with beds. I use the term beds as loosely as possible. These were to beds as a piece of cardboard is to shoes (a little SAT prep for you there). The mattresses we were provided looked as though they had been left over from WWII and had not been washed since. Can someone say "bedbugs!?" But in case you were afraid of catching any mattress herpes bugs, don't worry! They provide a (what we hoped was) sanitary sheet set the consistency of hard tissues to keep you safe and warm (let me clarify in case you were confused, these did not keep you safe or warm at all. If anything this sheet made you hotter when it was hot and colder when it was cold). To set this up required an acrobatic show worthy of Cirque du Soliel. Why was the set up so difficult, you ask!? Because they were bunk beds. By bunk beds I mean one precariously placed bench directly above another that you were supposed to be able to climb in a moving vehicle with nothing more than a step the size of a cell phone, a very inconveniently placed diagonal metal pole, and all the momentum you could muster in the one square foot you had to propel you up there. Oh and there was only about a foot between the bed and the ceiling once you got up there so giving yourself a concussion at some point was pretty much included in the price of the train ticket. That and the smell of stagnant body odor/ cigarette/ mold air was even stronger that high up so naturally you would want to open your window (because to top off the smells, it was about 180 degrees... Or whatever temperature is necessary for the walls around you to start sweating). A warning to anyone who will ever ride on a Russian train. DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOWS. EVER. At night, even though the sun essentially doesn't set, it is COLD LIKE SIBERIA. And that damn tissue blanket isn't doing anything to trap in body heat which means you're forced to freeze to death or use a blanket that looks about as old and dirty as the mattresses and feels like its made of bear fur (and not a bear that uses Pantine).  I chose freezing to death.  So after this lovely experience, we arrived in Saint Petersburg and were taken to our hostel... Rainbow Hostel. A place where toilets shoot out rainbows (refer to the picture posed on Facebook). Apparently thats where all the college age kids stay because when we got there we were greeted by an assortment of characters all there for the weekend festivities.  That was when we met Arsenal (that's the closest any of us can get to remembering his name, however I usually just refer to him as anything that starts with an A). He was from Siberia on his way to a conference in Germany where they would be speaking in English for some law school internship even though he looked like he was 12 (but had hr creepiness of Russian men far beyond his years). His story didn't really hold up in retrospect but at the time when he offered to give us a tour of the city we all blindly accepted and followed him around like a pack of rainbow zombies. Just to put it into perspective, him giving us a tour of Saint Petersburg was about as legit as if I gave any of you a tour of New York after only having been there for one day. All the same we followed him for FOUR HOURS on a tour of the city that turned into less of a city tour and more of an up close look at how creepy Russian men are, how we weren't allowed to take pictures but when we didn't we were criticized for not having our cameras, how the only acceptable tours here are those done at a jog, and how it seemed as though he wanted to take all of us back to Siberia with him to have as sister wives... Even Michael. It got especially wonderful when he took us down the escalator to the metro that we were literally on for about five minutes because this metro is the deepest in the world and then we had to ride a convoluted maze of metros through the depths of the earth to get back to Rainbow.  Needless to say after that adventure we were ready to cook our condom-wrapped hot dogs and ramen and go to bed.