| MONEY: ALL AND IMMEDIATELY!
I
arrived in Yekaterinburg in the heart of a cold and windy night.
At first I thought to sleep on the benches of the waiting room,
but there was no way to stay there without having a valid ticket
for a train, in fact I was kicked out by the guards at the entrance
not available at all to do exceptions. After having discarded a
super gloomy room in the scaring huge concrete building of the hotel
in front of the station, I began walking to the center looking for
an accommodation. It took some hours to find the place of one among
those indicated by the Lonely Planet, but with big disappointment
I found just an under construction building. Then after wandering
a while, finally at 8.30 a.m. I found a room at hotel Bolshoy Ural.
Despite not being cheap (1600 rubls = 46 euros (12/03), it was quite
big and I was so tired and frozen that I decided to fix it for
two nights. A the beginning the woman at the reception had been
rough and impolite, as usual in Russia, but nothing compared to
what she became when I said her I had to change the money to pay
to the second night. Given she was freaking out I reassured her
it was just a matter of few hours for her to get such money. I could
see the anger burning in her eyes, while she confiscated one of
our passports yelling I would have got it back just I when I
had paid. I still don't understand such behavior towards a foreign
customer who in the early morning has to change to pay the night
next to the one he has already paid and still not slept. Anyway
I went in the room to rest and unfreeze till the afternoon, but
some hours later two guys knocked at the door. They were two guards
who come to take us to the nearest bank to change to money. So it
was, and half of hour later the bitch had her money and I got our
passport back!
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THE ADVENTURE OF
BUYING A TRAIN TICKET
I
entered in the ticket office at the station in Kazan, hoping to manage to buy quickly and
painlessly the ticket to Yekaterinburg. Unluckily I hadn't a clue of how tough it'd have
been. Remember you need to indicate the train number to the woman of the box office, so
first of all you need to translate the schedule in order to identify it. The train
schedule was a huge panel, at least 7 meters high, indicating all the trains passing,
leaving and arriving at the station using always the Moscow time. While it's not so
difficult to figure out which are the trains to your destination and at what time they
leave, it's not easy to understand in which days they run. In fact there was the note
section in the schedule specifying if the trains were in the even or odd days but were
also indicated a lot of other numbers. After a while meditating about the different
possibilities I chose more options and started queuing. In the hall there were many
queues apparently not so long, but they turned out to be very slow. One hour later I was
still standing more or less in the same place, when I group of militaries entered and
skipping the queue crowded in front of the window. This made me freaked up and I started
complained, but people around me explained they had the priority. Several time the police
entered to kicked out the drunks sat on the benches hoping in a shelter from the outdoor
coldness. The police was very determined shouting and pushing them out around the other
indifferent Russians, I guess that situation wasn't something new for them.
Trying to communicate with the people around me I knew an english speaker guy, no
way!!!!! Taking him in front of the train schedule I immediately asked explanation. He
peered it, thought a little bit and then said he didn't understand what it meant.
Shit!!!!Then finally my turn came and the mess started. The woman of the ticket office,
among a lot of things I didn't understand, said my train there wasn't, but I could get
another, but that in third class was full.. while I sked her to write the train numbers on
a piece of paper trying to pass her it through the hole of the window.
It took a while and at the end I got a ticket for a train that arrived at my
destination in the middle of the night. At first I thought:" who minds, I've the
ticket, that is important", I didn't know it would have been the longest night of the
whole travel.
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