nvm25's VirtualTourist Home Page

Hi there!
As you can see my home location is now set to be Oslo, Norway. This was a really hard decision to make! My heart and my home is actually in St.Petersburg, Russia, but no matter how devoted I am to my lovely birthplace I have to admit that now that I'm studying in Oslo I don't get to be at home in St.Petersburg that often, and I'm not well-updated on what's going on there. Meaning: I can't be very helpful with a lot of practicall tips on "where to go", "what to eat" etc. since the opening hours, cool eat-outs and many local habits change pretty quickly indeed. This, coupled with the fact that most of my travelling essentially starts from either Gardemoen or Torp, explains why I'm now greeting you from Oslo!

After more than two years' freeriding on the never-disappointing travel tips from the VT community, I decided it was about time to start "paying back" with some tips of my own. So, some days before I became "forever 26" I joined you guys :))
My travel pages are filling up very slowly indeed, but I hope to be able to at least write the intros for all of the destinations on my travel map ("the minimum program"), and hopefully to contribute with some litterary and historical insights into St.Petersburg and its environs, as well as to share my very subjectve understanding of "the unique feel" that some of the places in this beautiful world have about them ("the maximum program")

For those who can't read Russian, here is my improvised translation
of the poem to the left:

Oh happy world where it's so free to breethe!
Show me a man who thinks his race is run,
Show me the one who's sighing with unease -
I dare to make them happy everyone!
Just let them come, and I'll be there to tell
My story of the girl with greenish eyes,
The story of a blueish morning spell
When shiny verse looms up through murky skies
Just let them come! Because I'm here to preach
Preach over and again, a thousand times,
How sweet it is to live and to beseige
The waves, the girls, the enemies, the rhymes...

I found this poem accidentally - on an Abreisskalender page put inside a
cookbook I took from home. It stroke me by its simplicity, its happyness
and obvious inconsistence with the fate of Gumilev, so I put it in my
agenda and have it with me ever since. Gumilev was the husband of the great Russian poet Akhmatova (were her eyes green?) and a martyr of the soviet repression system (executed in a undisclosed location, which some people have recently claimed to be by the river near a raiway station in Vsevolozhsk that is just close to where our "datscha" is)