Day 10 and 11- Trains, Shawls and Taxis
This one has been a little while in coming, mostly because there hasn't been a whole lot we've done apart from traveling on the train, and partially because that left us very very tired. But here goes, I'll try to keep it a little brief so this doesn't turn into a wall of text.
We left the hotel on our last day in Volgograd and headed straight for the train station, our train wasn't actually for several hours, but we wanted to catch up on our emails and relax before the very long trip in front of us. We checked our baggage into left luggage at the station, we've gotten that down to a fine art now I think, it seems to be the same cost everywhere and we found out the word for today that way. It really is much easier than dragging two 15kg+ suitcases through the snow. We then headed for the Grand Cafe which is the most convenient place we'd found to go online in Volgograd. There were lots of internet cafes, but we weren't really sure what we'd have to say to get set up there and if we kept ordering drinks (which were really nice when they weren't $15 juices) they just kept giving us cards with public internet passwords on them. The cards didn't last for long, 30 mins or 15MB at most, but it was enough for us between drinks.
Unfortunately that day we had to upload photos too, so I think Mon went through 2 cards just uploading her shots, but by the end of it we'd done everything we needed to do, and I'd constructed a nice flower shape on the table with used cards and unused sugar packets.
We hopped on the train to Moscow without too much trouble, we'd picked up our tickets earlier when we checked our bags and because they were nice looking normal tickets instead of online printed ones we had no issues with the grumpy train lady. When we got onto the train we already had one traveling companion waiting for us, an older woman from Astrakhan (the previous stop) named Irina who turned out to know a fair bit of English. We thought our second companion was going to be this bearded Jewish guy with about 5 daughters who'd all come to see him off, but it turns out he decided to change or something, which was great because the guy who ended up with us instead was really good. His name was Vasili and he worked for a mobile phone application development company out of Austria that seemed to require him to fly all around Europe to meetings and sales things, and thus he had a lot to talk to us about and also had very good English. It helped too that he had a novelty t-shirt on that said "No Kangaroos in Austria", so I think he was quite chuffed to actually meet people from Australia which the joke played off.
The trip in general was very good, we talked for much of it about different countries, languages, Volgograd (where he was from) and all of the other places we were planning to go. He'd been home to see his parents and his mother had sent him home with a big bag of food, it reminded me very much of my own mother, though I doubt mine would give me a rolled up plastic bag of sugar for my tea. The highlight of the trip would have to be the shawl lady though. At one point we're stopped for say 30 minutes at a rural station waiting for people to board etc... and this woman just appears in our cabin's doorway with a big woolen shawl and holds it up, spouting something which I assume usually assisted in selling shawls. It was bizarre, we were mid sentence, and then all of a sudden this old lady is there shoving shawls in her face, I don't think she was a passenger, I think she just got on at the station. Needless to say, no-one bought a shawl, but I was almost tempted just for the story alone. I slept reasonably well, though I'd intended to so a bit of reading and writing which didn't get done because by the time we stopped talking I was exhausted, and when we woke up it was not long before we arrived in Moscow.
First thing we decided to do was check in our luggage, we had hours before our connecting train to Smolensk and the last thing we wanted to do was cart our bags with us everywhere we went too. Luckily the station we arrived at was the same that our Moscow hotel was near so we first headed off there to fix up our paperwork. See the way things work in Russia is that if you're in the same place as a tourist for more than a few business days you have to register your visas to let the government know where you are. The hotels will do it for you but they also give you some paperwork afterwards which you can show if asked to show where you were. Not needed most of the time, but if the Police ever decided to give us a hard time, we didn't want anything they could hold over us. We didn't even realise that the Moscow Hotel didn't give it to us until the Volgograd one did and we started to get suspicious, so it was all the way back to the Moscow Hotel for us to ask what happened.
The bonus of going back to the Hotel too was that my phone was still set up on their wireless network, so when we arrived I quickly flicked it on so it would connect and downloaded all my emails to read later. It was a good thing I did too as I had one from my mother from days before which I hadn't been able to get because of the Coffee Shop internet access we were using not supporting it. The Hotel was thankfully very easy to deal with (we'd picked them for that reason as they all speak English) and after standing around in the boiling hot lobby for 10 minutes we got our paperwork and went on our way. We spent a little time in Starbucks near the station but then decided it wasn't where we wanted to fill another 3 hours and picked up our bags to take the Metro to the station we'd be leaving from. On the way I managed to spot a very large and very dead rat mostly frozen in the middle of the alley near the station though, every now and then you just get a little reminder that you're in a very different part of the world than you're used to.
Getting through the Metro with our bags was a challenge as the crush of people is not something fun to navigate when you're carting something huge and heavy with you, but thankfully it was only a few stops away and we soon arrived at Beloruskiya Station which was painted in a sickly green with matching green signs which made everything look like the lobby of a hospital. We still had a couple of hours to kill so we ate lunch at Russia's version of KFC. It literally was KFC, but they called it something different and the mascot is some giant chicken with a chef's hat. I'm always a little concerned when the mascot of a restaurant is the animal it's famous for, seems a little sadistic for this chicken to sign on to promote the wholesale slaughter and consumption of it's own people.
The food was as expected though (however in smaller quantities than the Australian version and I'm sure the US one), and we only had a little more time to kill so we wandered around the streets, spent some time watching people bravely try to cross a busy intersection, and stopped by a place called Coffee House which had a hilarious English song on loop about loving coffee and coffee loving me. I have a short recording of it actually, I'll see if I can get it off my phone later and upload it for everyone. We also laughed way too much at seeing the Avatar DVD written in Cyrillic in a shop window, which reads as ABATAP.
When it was finally time to get our connecting train we picked up our bags and waited on the platform, only to end up waiting about 30 minutes in the cold when every train except ours had a platform assigned and ours sat there mocking us. We got on before our toes froze though and took our seats, this one was only a shorter 5 hour trip so we were in seats rather than the sleeper cabins, and by this time we just wanted to finally be in Smolensk, so it didn't matter how we got there. The train ride was pretty bearable, the scenery is a lot nicer going in this direction than it is going to Volgograd, the trees are a little less barren, though of course everything is still covered in snow. The guy across from us was a little bit creepy, perhaps it's just the general unpleasant vibe that a lot of the men have here, but I was glad when he went to sleep and stopping stretching out in his seat and getting up every few minutes to get more tea.
We arrived in Smolensk at about 9:30pm and exited on masse with a lot of our carriage, our train was continuing on to somewhere else, but it seemed a lot of our section where all going to Smolensk. Annoyingly getting out of the station involved dragging our bags up a huge set of stairs, across a tiny bridge and right back down the stairs again, not the most fun task when you're exhausted from two days of train travel. We got through it though but not quite in time as all the taxis quickly vanished with others in them and we were left standing in the snow with tired expressions on our faces.
Taxis in Russia work in a very strange way, they have no uniform as far as I can tell and their cars are more or less anything they can whack a little light on top of. They stand around and harass you on the street for a "Takseee" and if you want to go somewhere you barter a price with them before you go. We could have walked to our hotel but it was a long way and just not in us at the time so we set off to find a taxi. When we finally did he spat on the ground before talking to us and declared it would be 200rub to get to our hotel. This was a lot more than the Lonely Planet guide told us to expect, but it's still only about $8AUD and way cheaper than Australian taxis, so we didn't care and accepted right away. The taxi was a 70s or 80s beater of a car with no seatbelts except for the drivers, which he wasn't wearing, we piled in and within a couple of minutes we dropped us off at the front of the hotel and I handed him a small wad of bills which he proceeded to paw over while we went up the stairs and into our hotel. After a quick exchange with the desk staff in broken Russian we managed to get our room key, hastily pick our breakfast for the next morning and expend just enough energy to haul ass up the stairs and flop on the big comfortable bed.
Our hotel room is really nice and reminds me of some kind of ski lodge, without the skiing. It's probably the nicest place we've stayed in so far and we're staying here another night more than we planned as we decided to cut Pskov from our trip. It was always going to be tricky to get to as we'd have to buy a bus ticket on the day, but when we got here we decided it just wasn't something we wanted to risk and end up somewhere in rural Russia without any life line. As such we added another day to our 1.5 in Smolensk and will head straight from here back to Moscow and then to St Petersburg on the train. A good thing too, this town is really pretty and I love the huge amounts of snow and the very genuine country town experience this place is, it's been great to see the many sides of Russia.
I'll make another post with today's antics and photos as this ended up pretty long. Chat to you all again very soon!
We left the hotel on our last day in Volgograd and headed straight for the train station, our train wasn't actually for several hours, but we wanted to catch up on our emails and relax before the very long trip in front of us. We checked our baggage into left luggage at the station, we've gotten that down to a fine art now I think, it seems to be the same cost everywhere and we found out the word for today that way. It really is much easier than dragging two 15kg+ suitcases through the snow. We then headed for the Grand Cafe which is the most convenient place we'd found to go online in Volgograd. There were lots of internet cafes, but we weren't really sure what we'd have to say to get set up there and if we kept ordering drinks (which were really nice when they weren't $15 juices) they just kept giving us cards with public internet passwords on them. The cards didn't last for long, 30 mins or 15MB at most, but it was enough for us between drinks.
Unfortunately that day we had to upload photos too, so I think Mon went through 2 cards just uploading her shots, but by the end of it we'd done everything we needed to do, and I'd constructed a nice flower shape on the table with used cards and unused sugar packets.
We hopped on the train to Moscow without too much trouble, we'd picked up our tickets earlier when we checked our bags and because they were nice looking normal tickets instead of online printed ones we had no issues with the grumpy train lady. When we got onto the train we already had one traveling companion waiting for us, an older woman from Astrakhan (the previous stop) named Irina who turned out to know a fair bit of English. We thought our second companion was going to be this bearded Jewish guy with about 5 daughters who'd all come to see him off, but it turns out he decided to change or something, which was great because the guy who ended up with us instead was really good. His name was Vasili and he worked for a mobile phone application development company out of Austria that seemed to require him to fly all around Europe to meetings and sales things, and thus he had a lot to talk to us about and also had very good English. It helped too that he had a novelty t-shirt on that said "No Kangaroos in Austria", so I think he was quite chuffed to actually meet people from Australia which the joke played off.
The trip in general was very good, we talked for much of it about different countries, languages, Volgograd (where he was from) and all of the other places we were planning to go. He'd been home to see his parents and his mother had sent him home with a big bag of food, it reminded me very much of my own mother, though I doubt mine would give me a rolled up plastic bag of sugar for my tea. The highlight of the trip would have to be the shawl lady though. At one point we're stopped for say 30 minutes at a rural station waiting for people to board etc... and this woman just appears in our cabin's doorway with a big woolen shawl and holds it up, spouting something which I assume usually assisted in selling shawls. It was bizarre, we were mid sentence, and then all of a sudden this old lady is there shoving shawls in her face, I don't think she was a passenger, I think she just got on at the station. Needless to say, no-one bought a shawl, but I was almost tempted just for the story alone. I slept reasonably well, though I'd intended to so a bit of reading and writing which didn't get done because by the time we stopped talking I was exhausted, and when we woke up it was not long before we arrived in Moscow.
First thing we decided to do was check in our luggage, we had hours before our connecting train to Smolensk and the last thing we wanted to do was cart our bags with us everywhere we went too. Luckily the station we arrived at was the same that our Moscow hotel was near so we first headed off there to fix up our paperwork. See the way things work in Russia is that if you're in the same place as a tourist for more than a few business days you have to register your visas to let the government know where you are. The hotels will do it for you but they also give you some paperwork afterwards which you can show if asked to show where you were. Not needed most of the time, but if the Police ever decided to give us a hard time, we didn't want anything they could hold over us. We didn't even realise that the Moscow Hotel didn't give it to us until the Volgograd one did and we started to get suspicious, so it was all the way back to the Moscow Hotel for us to ask what happened.
The bonus of going back to the Hotel too was that my phone was still set up on their wireless network, so when we arrived I quickly flicked it on so it would connect and downloaded all my emails to read later. It was a good thing I did too as I had one from my mother from days before which I hadn't been able to get because of the Coffee Shop internet access we were using not supporting it. The Hotel was thankfully very easy to deal with (we'd picked them for that reason as they all speak English) and after standing around in the boiling hot lobby for 10 minutes we got our paperwork and went on our way. We spent a little time in Starbucks near the station but then decided it wasn't where we wanted to fill another 3 hours and picked up our bags to take the Metro to the station we'd be leaving from. On the way I managed to spot a very large and very dead rat mostly frozen in the middle of the alley near the station though, every now and then you just get a little reminder that you're in a very different part of the world than you're used to.
Getting through the Metro with our bags was a challenge as the crush of people is not something fun to navigate when you're carting something huge and heavy with you, but thankfully it was only a few stops away and we soon arrived at Beloruskiya Station which was painted in a sickly green with matching green signs which made everything look like the lobby of a hospital. We still had a couple of hours to kill so we ate lunch at Russia's version of KFC. It literally was KFC, but they called it something different and the mascot is some giant chicken with a chef's hat. I'm always a little concerned when the mascot of a restaurant is the animal it's famous for, seems a little sadistic for this chicken to sign on to promote the wholesale slaughter and consumption of it's own people.
The food was as expected though (however in smaller quantities than the Australian version and I'm sure the US one), and we only had a little more time to kill so we wandered around the streets, spent some time watching people bravely try to cross a busy intersection, and stopped by a place called Coffee House which had a hilarious English song on loop about loving coffee and coffee loving me. I have a short recording of it actually, I'll see if I can get it off my phone later and upload it for everyone. We also laughed way too much at seeing the Avatar DVD written in Cyrillic in a shop window, which reads as ABATAP.
When it was finally time to get our connecting train we picked up our bags and waited on the platform, only to end up waiting about 30 minutes in the cold when every train except ours had a platform assigned and ours sat there mocking us. We got on before our toes froze though and took our seats, this one was only a shorter 5 hour trip so we were in seats rather than the sleeper cabins, and by this time we just wanted to finally be in Smolensk, so it didn't matter how we got there. The train ride was pretty bearable, the scenery is a lot nicer going in this direction than it is going to Volgograd, the trees are a little less barren, though of course everything is still covered in snow. The guy across from us was a little bit creepy, perhaps it's just the general unpleasant vibe that a lot of the men have here, but I was glad when he went to sleep and stopping stretching out in his seat and getting up every few minutes to get more tea.
We arrived in Smolensk at about 9:30pm and exited on masse with a lot of our carriage, our train was continuing on to somewhere else, but it seemed a lot of our section where all going to Smolensk. Annoyingly getting out of the station involved dragging our bags up a huge set of stairs, across a tiny bridge and right back down the stairs again, not the most fun task when you're exhausted from two days of train travel. We got through it though but not quite in time as all the taxis quickly vanished with others in them and we were left standing in the snow with tired expressions on our faces.
Taxis in Russia work in a very strange way, they have no uniform as far as I can tell and their cars are more or less anything they can whack a little light on top of. They stand around and harass you on the street for a "Takseee" and if you want to go somewhere you barter a price with them before you go. We could have walked to our hotel but it was a long way and just not in us at the time so we set off to find a taxi. When we finally did he spat on the ground before talking to us and declared it would be 200rub to get to our hotel. This was a lot more than the Lonely Planet guide told us to expect, but it's still only about $8AUD and way cheaper than Australian taxis, so we didn't care and accepted right away. The taxi was a 70s or 80s beater of a car with no seatbelts except for the drivers, which he wasn't wearing, we piled in and within a couple of minutes we dropped us off at the front of the hotel and I handed him a small wad of bills which he proceeded to paw over while we went up the stairs and into our hotel. After a quick exchange with the desk staff in broken Russian we managed to get our room key, hastily pick our breakfast for the next morning and expend just enough energy to haul ass up the stairs and flop on the big comfortable bed.
Our hotel room is really nice and reminds me of some kind of ski lodge, without the skiing. It's probably the nicest place we've stayed in so far and we're staying here another night more than we planned as we decided to cut Pskov from our trip. It was always going to be tricky to get to as we'd have to buy a bus ticket on the day, but when we got here we decided it just wasn't something we wanted to risk and end up somewhere in rural Russia without any life line. As such we added another day to our 1.5 in Smolensk and will head straight from here back to Moscow and then to St Petersburg on the train. A good thing too, this town is really pretty and I love the huge amounts of snow and the very genuine country town experience this place is, it's been great to see the many sides of Russia.
I'll make another post with today's antics and photos as this ended up pretty long. Chat to you all again very soon!