National Geographic?

Note: All of this has been translated from our original Russian blog. This explains any grammatical/spelling errors.

A couple years ago a good friend of mine told me that the most sought after job is being a photojournalist for national geographic. You get paid a ton, you get to travel, you get to express yourself, and you get plenty of recognition. This is relevent to the travel's of Lthomp's and myself insofar as it proves that geography is something everyone secretly loves. It also points to the beauty of the Lthomps-Veron John partnership. Lthomps goes to Emerson College, and as we all know that is a silly school in which people major in things such as "love" and "dance". However people there also major in photography. So she's got that side covered. I, on the other hand, go to a real university. Life is hard, I have to take classes like "biology" and "latin". But I also took a geography class. So you see, Lthomp's knows the photojournalism, and I know the important things.

Great, so now that I have convinced you that Lewis and Clark had nothing on us perhaps I can interest you in a story. A story concerning our first and most talked about trip:

St. Petersburg Russia.

Many people said that this trip couldn't be. "Northern Canada and Northern Russia don't connect." True, but what this working class, single mom didn't know is that the two places don't need to connect at all. They only need to sort of connect. We only need the two continents to be close enough together so that a sort of "skimming" (trademark) phenomenon can occur. Luckily in Lthomp's and myself's Harvard day we learned many things about Russia, in a book that I can't help but reference: "Born to Kvetch". We learned from our comrades at Harvard that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are two major Russian authors. We also knew from our nobel tutor Prof. DelleChaiae that Joseph Conrad was originally from Russia but later moved to England. Using this knowledge we decided that we would prove the nay-saying, working class, single moms WRONG.

And then came the big let down: the facebook group tease. We created a facebook group to see if anyone would like to join us for Spring break in St. Petersburg (not florida LOL), and many people-to our delight- responded with an affirmative YES. We began to make the preparations. I stole $50 worth of snack from CVS risking my LIFE, Lthomp's cleaned out her car (which involved reliving many painful memories for her), and we both were all a-giggle as the long anticipated day approached.

And then the day came. And Lthomp's and I were the only one's there. What a great way to start the trip: rejection. Mother Fucking REJECTION.

But we went anyway, we weren't going to let those working class, single moms have the last laugh. Ohhhh no, then they'd have everything. So we packed up the car (mostly the snacks) and left our home of Boston. As we saw that beautiful city shrink in the rear view mirror of Lthomp's Versa, we shed a tear, one tear between the two of us, and remembered that we had actually not spent most of our lives in Boston and identified more with cities like Lowell and Lawrence. But still...

We made our way North deciding to try to make it to Montreal that day (we didn't want to drive much the first day because our hearts were heavy with the pains of rejection). We took the way I took to get to UVM (the university I attended this past year but am transferring from in order to further enhance my cartographing skills), 93 to 89. We blasted through the three hours entertaining ourselves with stories and porn. When we got to Burlington Lthomp's and I found it quite impossible not to smoke a J as they say in that fine town, and then we just sort of fell asleep for 3 hours in a field of hippies. When we woke up we were quite angry to discover our folly. "What fools we are!" I exclaimed to Lthomps. "Why yes, how inconvenient." We promptly got supplies from KKD's and then hit the road for Montreal, only an hour and a half from Burlington.

We found no problems at the border, apart from the fact that the passport attendent thought Lthomp's was black and so held her for further questioning. But luckily she convinced him that she was not black and so was able to cross the border. Then it was basically a straight shot to MTL (montreal). When we got to the city it was 11:30 pm (eastern standard time) and we decided to stay in a hostel despite that movie that was made 2 years ago. And from there it is history....