About us, or Why Ants in Pants

Why Ants in Pants?

Because this is exactly the feeling Nastya has finding cheap tickets to… wherever. Then she calls Vitya who is busy with his studies. At first he tries to refuse, to go on studying, to be the only sober member of the family, but soon he catches ants as well. The tickets are bought, and the planning starts. Seeing how little time we have for the trip, and how much there is to visit, the ants gain strength, and we end up jumping from one place to another every day during the trip. Tired to death, we bring home thousands of pictures and plans for the next trip. But between the journeys we have little time to actually share our emotions from the visited countries with our friends and friends-to-be. That is why this blog has been created. We would like to share and promote places we’ve been to and loved to you. Also, preparing for the trips we often notice that in spite of the long-lasting existence of the Internet, many countries are still neglected, as a visitor encounters difficulties in planning the itinerary, choosing the places to visit, what transport to choose. That is why most of our posts will be very detailed – we would like to help!

Who we are?

We are two PhD students currently living in Estonia (ok, in the US, but it is temporary). Nastya was born in Uzbekistan, and after the USSR collapse moved to Belarus with her parents, where Vitya had been born. We later met and married. Well, in between meeting and marriage, we lived in Saint-Petersburg, and later moved to Estonia. Nastya is a doctoral student in folklore, and Vitya – in power engineering.
You are the students: where do you get money to travel?
This is the question we often receive. It usually comes from people with houses, cars, kids – all the property we don’t own because we travel. Also, we travel on a budget. We carefully search for the tickets, couchsurf, often hitchhike. We are not the extreme budget tourists (although the stories of such people are incredible, and we hope to tell some of them once on this website). Sometimes we stay in a hotel (ok, a hostel), and use public transport. So we hope that our stories will be useful both for those who are on the extremely tight budget and who appreciate comfort.
What are your favorite countries you would recommend to visit?

Who is Pika?

Pika is the third member of our team, its mascot and little baby. A psychoanalysyst will say he is a projection of the kids we don’t have, and to some extent will be right. We rescued Pika from evil Chinese (imagine a Japanese toy in their hands!) while travelling on Shenzhen. There was a tech fair held there, and its leader threw toys into the crowd. Fortunately, Vitya is a great football player (and a goalkeeper) – he caught Pikachu saving him from a Chinese girl who was trying to catch it and got upset when she did not. She was a grown-up girl, no worries, no kids suffered. Pikachu gradually became Pika.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank those who helps and inspires us for creating this website! Thanks to all our friends, who keep patiently listening to the stories about our travellings and still say they want us to have a blog to read it. We want to thank a wonderful person Luda from Columbus for a factual push towards the creation of this website by starting to give recommendations about how the website is actually created and encouraging us to start. Luda and her spouse Alexander are incredibly altruist people, among other multiple things they did for us, they loaned their car so that we could make a trip around American Midwest, Southeast and Great Plains.

We are happy that we meet so different people in our trips, those who taught us various things from hitch-hiking (thanks to Sasha from Russia and Natasha from Slovenia) to couchsurfing (this was you initially, Sonya!), and to all couchsurfers and hitch-hikers we met on our way. It is great that there are travelers whom we meet again and again: they visit us and we visit them (Petya and Ivo from Bulgaria, Rita from Greece). And there a great friends whom we visited without couchsurfing: Ambroz, Aldi, Rita, Ralf, Elliott, Alla, Sonya (we will reach you, we promise!). Thanks to parents, grandparents and brothers who in spite of signing deeply each time we buy tickets to wherever keep tactic silence and don’t lock us at home. Finally, this website would have never been created without Yura “Krabolov” who helped us for free and was extremely patient and friendly answering our stupid questions.