The Scariest 24 hours of my Life in Russia

We were awoken abruptly at 3am on the train. There was supposedly some problem with our visas, and so, shaking with fear and cold, we packed our luggage and stepped out into the unknown. It was dark and cold and windy, there were Russian military police everywhere, no one spoke any english, and huge dogs prowled. I really had no idea what to expect. Roy was shaking so hard that her knees were knocking together. I was really expecting detention rooms and cells.

Here's an excerpt from the journal I wrote then, while awaiting our fate:

Everybody's writing their journals, so I guess I better write something to keep myself occupied.
...
This sucks.
I wanna get out of this hellhole.

The problem was that we had exceeded our visa by 3 hours. We had left St Petersburg at 8pm, but the train only reached the border at 3am, so our visa had expired.

We were taken to some office in the barracks. The worst thing was that nobody spoke any English and so we werent' clear what we were supposed to do, and what we could do to get out fast. And at some point, they took Roy away to buy train tickets. However, I didn't know that, so I got more and more nervous as time passed- were they going to be interrogating us one by one?

There were endless forms to fill up, and endless bureucracy to get through. Maybe 4 hours later, at 6am, much of the paperwork was settled and we could rest. So we slept in the chairs in the waiting room.

At 9, we went to the bank to change our money to change our fines. At about 10, everything was sort of settled. So we settled down to wait for our train to come again at 2am. And so we waited and we waited. I was tense with anticipation because I didn't know if new bureaucratic roadbloacks would be thrown our way at the last minute and we would have to stay in Russia for another day. And so we waited.

What a classic case of a holiday gone wrong.

Riga

This will be the beginning of (hopefully) a series of posts about my backpacking trip across Eastern Europe this summer. I'll try to blog whenever I get wireless internet at a hostel or get to an internet cafe.


The beginning of our epic journey wasn't very good. We arrived in Riga grumpy. As grumpy as you could imagine us possibly be, and wandered around Riga in a daze. We were probably too tired to admire its beauty, but walked because we felt we had to. So in our first day, we went to the House of Blackheads and the Occupation Museum, but we were really really tired. We were so tired that we gave up and returned to our hostel, falling asleep at 5 pm in our hostel.


2nd Day
The second day was much better. We woke up bright and early and cheerful (though HZ and I later went back to sleep till eleven =))

Anyway, we went to Riga's Central Market, where there was food, fruits, and flowers galore.

Went to the Bastejalns





Freedom Monument, affectionately called 'Milda' by the locals.

Peeves:

It's not a peeve, but I'm not entirely sure people are supposed to read this much while on holiday with other people.

Raves:

The locals were really polite and friendly and patient. The cars on the street were really courteous and did not horn at us (sigh londoners) jaywalking across the street. The shop keepers and waitresses were also really patient, explaining to us over and over again what the different kinds of food were, and where to go to. I was really impressed, because this is so different from brusque and efficient Singapore, or generally reserved London.

Impression: quiet, friendly

Not the vibrancy of a big city, but retains its old world charm and friendliness

Next stop: Moscow