Wait, I'm not finished yet!

It's been a long weekend, my last one in Vladivostok, I had gone parachuting on the Saturday and crammed as much as I could in on Sunday. Late on Sunday evening Dina calls me and says, "How about taking the train at 6am tomorrow to the village?" I woke up the next morning at 5 am and dragged my feet to the train muttering angrily. But it was all worth it. A wonderful day in the village and a climb up another mountain.  

Here we take a break and have tea with frozen blueberries and compete with bugs to eat our bread with cheese before they do. I'm still not fully awake yet but I am glad I woke up when my alarm went off. 

It's Wednesday now, a couple days before I leave. I have the dream of taking a ferry to the farthest island in St. Peter's Gulf. So Dina, who is always ready to encourage my adventures, comes along. It's foggy and rainy.

A map of the area courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

Land sighted! Of course if we got off to look at the island, we would have had to sleep there over night since the boat only comes and goes once during weekdays.

We come back to harbour and decide to do it again, this time taking a boat towards North Korea. Don't worry, it's still some distance away from that country.

Our new boat. There are cheap valour seats and grimy old dining tables. Blue curtains shade the windows. 

 This is the antennae. Look closely.

We take a seat at the top because there's a better view but before the boat gets into harbour we have to deal with some pretty polluted black smoke billowing from the back of the boat.

Elena took me right up to the lighthouse the week before. There's this tiny little land bridge that sort of disappears right before you get there. 

It's getting even colder outside. Dina and I slip into the captain's room and take candid photos. Then I settle on the old leather couch in the corner and act really polite so as not to be kicked back into the windy weather. I try to impress the captain by saying that I'm from Canada. "Oh yeah, had lots of those," he says. Who else from Canada goes to Vladivostok and takes a silly little ferry ride to the middle of nowhere? Well, he lets me stay anyway.

As we arrive, a little boy comes to meet us on his bicycle. 

After Church one Sunday, Dima (Dmitry) and Nastia invite me to come explore Russian Island. At one time, all the forts on Russian Island could hold back the world's armies for 15min. At least, that's what they claim. But in any case, there are abandoned forts everywhere and most of them are unregulated, which makes it fun for any explorer.

Fort #17. 

 You can see the inside of this stairwell because of the flash on my camera, but in fact it was pitch black and we had to rely on Dima's cell phone flashlight. The walls are oozing with humidity and the steps are crumbling with decay.

 It was Yana's birthday the week before and we went to the ocean, swam, and played games and had shishlik (shish kabobs). Here now the group of us young Church-goers take our final Sunday walk. The sky is blue, the weather is perfect... I'm filled with gratitude and overwhelmed by all the beautiful people and incredible experiences I have had my nine months here. I expected the worst those months when I was debating whether or not I should actually go, and yet despite my concerns I went anyway. If I can explain my decision, I can only do it by paraphrasing Paulo Coehlo, who's book "The Alchemist" greatly influenced my final decision to come. He writes something like this: every person has a dream, some choose to follow it and others try to forget it. I didn't want to be that person who tried to forget her dream. I figured there was a reason I had been thinking of going to Russia for three years and I needed to find out why. In so many ways I am not the person I was before. As I tell everyone, here finally is the adventure I had been dreaming of.