Second day ashore and fellow trainee Jelena and I joined some off-duty crew members for a few drinks around St Petersburg. Since our trainee crew of 70-ish was largely made up of 16 & 17 year olds, the powers that be had set a curfew time of 01:00. Given the size of St Petersburg, there seemed surprisingly few good places to go for a quiet drink or 5... there were evidently a good number of clubs that would start to kick off just as we had to think about getting back to the ship and plenty of restaurants, but not so many bars. We found a decent one thanks to asking around a bit and were rewarded with a groovy vibe and some good live music.
Nationalities, left to right:
Russian (the arm), Danish, Dutch, Serbian/Norwegian, Danish, Swedish.
After a good few, and given the size of St Petersburg and curfew, we required a taxi home. The helpful bar staff could speak a bit of English and between us we indicated to the taxi driver where on the map we needed to go and we agreed a price. So good so far.
Us having a blast before the taxi driver decided we must have all been delusional before and actually where we really wanted to go was the international ferry terminal a couple of miles away!
Due the language barrier, and despite our cries of dismay from the back, we failed to convince him to stop and go back to where we wanted until we'd actually reaced the terminal!
After some rowdy attempts at communication and finger stabbing of map, we persuaded him to take us back to somewhere we could walk to the ship in 5 or 10 mins. Since it was already curfew time we scurried along the road drunkenly debating how much trouble we'd all be in and, perhaps more importantly, whether the port passport control was still open and if we could even get to our ship without swimming! We got to the ship late and appologised our way on board but were cut short – we needn't worry about our minor transgressions, worse events had transpired...
Two of the young trainees had got danderously drunk and one was in hospital!
Here you order vodka by the glass or by the litre bottle and a group of them had shared a bottle and got fairly drunk. Someone had enthusiastically gone back for some more glasses and accidentally come back with a bottle... since most were stoked enough, the new bottle was mostly consumed by the three casualties.
Next morning, Sørlandet's Captain gave an empassioned speech – in Norwegian since the subject didn't really concern the international trainees, though I understood most without translation – about how we were here in St Petersburg firstly representing Norway and secondly Sørlandet, he was ambitious for the ship, he wanted us to be the best. He liked us as a group of trainees and thought we'd done well in the race, but the events of last night could not be repeated.
The curfew was pulled back to midnight & the barely recovered drunks given punishment. The hospitalised guy didn't return until the next day and, in addition to similar ship-based punishments, had to call his parents to tell them what he'd done!
Ah the difficulties of the teenage dance with the demon drink!
Lessons learned lets hope! :P
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