John, at the north pole. One interesting anecdote from our train journey was that we were seated in our 4-person cabin with an older couple: The husband was drunk beyond any ability to communicate with him (and stayed this way for the duration of our 28 hour train ride via a cornucopia shopping bag of vodka and beer kept under his bed, and his charming wife was upset with him, but also kept asking us where in Finland we were from. After hours of listening to us converse as English, she had not recognized it as such, and really thought we were Scandanavian. Absolutely no one here speaks English. One Murmanskian told us the last American he had known to come to Murmansk was a spy during the cold war who only wanted to ride the Ferris wheel (as to score a better vantage point for his reconaissance photos).