To Russia With Love

We may have eluded to this process in some of our other blogs, but just to make sure it all gets in there I’ll explain the process of getting a Russia visa.  We started by looking into getting this visa through a Russian Consulate in London, and their response by email was look at our website it has all the information, but clearly it didn’t as we were searching for more info.  We also tried looking into getting it in South Africa and then Ireland to come to one conclusion, we had to get the visa from our country of residence.  How were we suppose to do that with traveling as we were, and the only exception they made was for people residing in a country more than 90 days.

And so, we came to the conclusion that somehow our passports had to get back to the US and sent to us.  Our first choice was to send the passports back with Bill’s mother as she was visiting us, but we had hoped to get into Ireland before sending them back and our plans with his mom ended up being in England.  And so, it was decided that we would find an American company where we could send our passports to by FedEx and get a one day visa service so they could send back the visa to us in Ireland as I had a friend who just moved there and we would use her new in-laws address.

And so, Bill went through the process of searching for different travel companies that specialized in it as a Russian Visa also must include a letter of invitation which they get for you.  He also had to find a company that could get it done in one day.  And so, he got responses from a various companies, and picked the one company, Travel All Russia,  that let us pay by check as it was cheaper than credit card, based in New York for faster shipping, and said that if we mailed it on Monday, they would receive it by Tuesday, get the visa processed Wednesday, and we would then receive it in the mail on Friday as it would take longer coming to Ireland with the time change.

Then we looked at the visa application that Travel All Russia had on their website in Word Document format making it tricky to print out correctly.  But, the visa application was six pages long including all the places you have traveled in the last ten years, what community service organizations you belong to, and on and on.  And so, we finally got them all filled out, and got our package ready in London right before we got to Ireland where we’d mail this package.

How hard can it be to find a FedEx in Ireland?  Well, apparently very hard because only one seems to exist in Dublin.  And the town, Swords, had a DHL office, so we decided to go there to find out that this office is headquarters and doesn’t actually take packages.  So, they sent us out to the airport.  We get to the airport and no one has any idea where it is.  We finally find someone to tell us to go to the cargo terminal, and sure enough on the big map of this terminal there’s one.  However, it no longer exists.  So now we have to go back to the airport, and find out where the new building was.  I got directions from the internet and Bill got them from the tourist office.  And so, between these two direction, we finally find it.  We started this task around 11:30 and complete it by 2:30.

The next day the tracking number shows that it is received by the office at 12:00 New York time, but that night we receive an email saying that our applications had to be fixed because they weren’t printed correctly.  So it will now be an extra day.  However, we do not receive word again until Thursday because the person handling our visa was out sick but saying everything is fine.  By Friday night, we find out that they still are not mailed back to us as they haven’t returned from the Consulate yet.  By this time, we had already bought tickets to Paris.  Bill had been thinking of leaving on Wednesday, but I had a funny feeling and pushed our flight out until Saturday.

By Friday, she replied telling us that they would get to us by Tuesday or Wednesday the latest.  On Tuesday, we still hadn’t heard anything, and had trouble finding a phone that could call international, so we emailed Bill’s mom to check.  This is when we find out that the visas had been mailed but sent International Economy and were not to arrive until Monday which for a package turned out to be more expensive when Bill looked at prices.  We asked if there was some way to change, and Bill’s mom check to find out that our agent had already realize the mistake and called the day before.  She must have not wanted to tell us what had really happened until it was fixed.  And so, we were trying to formulate a back up plan of intercepting the package in Dublin so we could make our flight.  But the package finally got delivered by Thursday, so we had it in time.

So you would think the story ends here?   Bill had tried to piece together a time line of this process to figure out where things had gone wrong.  According to our agent, the package wasn’t received until Wednesday, took Thursday to fix the problem with the application, and went out on Friday and her only mistake was not sending the package with the right postage.   However, we had a time stamp of when the package was signed for and an email from her Tuesday night her time telling us of the problem.   Things just didn’t add up and so I sent an email pointing out all those facts.  And her response was that there’s a time difference with Ireland only that for that time difference to make any sense in her logic, Ireland would have to be behind New York time and not the other way around.  And so, now it was just time to be grateful we finally had our passports back and would be able to make it to Russia.

And now, in Russia we learned all about Russian hospitality.   We had stayed with SERVAS hosts in New Zealand.  SERVAS is an international organization set up to encourage cultural exchange by providing travels with a list of hosts in a country, and then the travel contacts the host to stay with them for a period of 2 nights or arranges to meet a day host who may not have room for you to stay in their house.  So far on this trip, we have only be successful in New Zealand with arranging these hosts.  But in Russia when one host couldn’t accommodate us,  he forwarded our email to the Secretary of SERVAS for Russia, Alexey, and he found us hosts for our entire time here in Russia.

At first, we were a little overwhelmed with having our whole trip planned out like this as we had only expected to have one two night stay in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg, but these hosts where willing to have us longer and Alexey’s response to my concerns of not wanting to inconvenience anyone was, “You know, in Russia we usually host for a longer time - Russian hospitality cannot be put in the two-days-limit.”  And we found that to be so true as we changed our dates in St. Petersburg and Olga would not let us even consider the idea of a hotel.  Alexey even offered us his home for our first two nights in Moscow as we were not staying with a host in Moscow until the end of our trip.

And so, we arrived in Moscow after sitting on a tar mat being told our airplane couldn’t take off and switching planes causing a two hour delay.  We emailed Alexey to let him know we would arrive late.  And so, after taking money out from the ATM Bill found one driver who quoted us a price and a second one who quoted us a lower price.  We went with the second one who spoke English fairly well, for him to find out that we weren’t going to the center of Moscow but to the outskirts, but he never tried to change the price.

But now he was in a hurry to get us there so most of the time he was driving 100 miles an hour down the highway.  My seatbelt kept tightening up on my stomach as I wondered if it would leave a bruise.  And he would race to red lights and then drive to the left lane to get in front of the first car at the light and weave like crazy around the slow cars, I covered my eyes and hoped we wouldn’t be the crushed taxi that had flipped two times that we past to our left.  But we finally made it to the area, and he had to call Alexey to find the entrance to his building as we kept passing it.

And then, Alexey greeted us at the door and now it was around midnight.  But no problem as he showed us his room which would be our room for the next two nights as he would share his mother’s room while we were here.  And then he made some tea and we talked about Russia.  He showed us a copy of the magazine he works for which is similar to National Geographic but the Russian version that was out 50 years before National Geographic started. And we enjoyed our conversation, but finally made it to bed around 2:00 am.

The next morning needless to say, we had a late start to the day.  Alexey walked us out and showed us how to get back in and where to catch the bus to the metro.  Our first task was to try and buy train tickets to St. Petersburg.  Though by the time we reached the area with the train station, we were starved.  And so, the first restuarant on it that we saw a pizza sign in English spoke to us to walk right in.  However, there wasn't an English menu, and so we found the pizza section and guessed that the first one was margarita and Bill knew the Russian word for cheese, so we hoped we ordered the 4 cheeses pizza.  We had success as we actually ordered what we thought and garbled down the two pizzas.

After lunch we circled the building looking for train station and walked in and out confused as we knew there we three stations right next to each other.  We finally asked some younger guys as we were told that most people under 25 speak at least a little English as it's taught in school.  And they pointed to the building we were standing in front of.  Next, we were in for a lesson on Russian lines.  Most of the time they look fairly short, but that can be deceiving as it can still take a good 40 minutes to get to the front, and as soon as you get there, it's time ticket person to take a break.  Though when she returned, Bill tried in vain to explain in English so thanks to Alexey writing down what we needed on a paper, Bill handed that to her and shortly we had tickets for the train.

We then took the metro towards the old KGB headquarters to walk around that area.  Though Bill saw that I looked a bit tired, so we took a break in the кфве coffe shop we found, which may be the Russian Starbucks as they are overpriced and everywhere with good coffee.  We ended up walking in the wrong direction from where Bill wanted so ended up at Red Square starring at the Kremiln wall as it looks so forboding from the outside until you get to walk through Red Square.  We hung our in the Alexander park built overtop one of the rivers that once isolated the Kremlin from the city.  The artificial river that was built in the park, decorated with statues from famous fairy tales, had yet to be filled as spring had not yet sprung.

We left for our rendezvous with Alexey friend, Oleg, who was going to show us some of Moscow.  A note, Alexey and all of his friends are historians.  They enjoy sharing their knowledge with interested people.  We met Oleg in the metro station where the tour began.  He can spend 6 hours taking you through the metro describing all the details that have gone into these works of art.  It can be difficult for tourists to walk through these impressive stations as you are so busy looking up at the paintings or mosaics on the ceiling while Russians are busy running into you as they are in a hurry.

He took us down the main street that runs out to St. Petersburg that the czar use to take between the two cities.  We crossed over two of the rings of Moscow where walls once circled the city.  These have now been replaced by parks and roads.  As we walked we heard a number of stories about the city's history.  One of the interesting ones was about a very posh grocery store.  In fact the inside looked like it belonged in a place with its gilded trim and marble columns.  This store is only for the super rich because the prices prevent common people from shopping there.  When the Soviets took over, the owner of the store fled for Europe but could not take all there riches so they hid some in the store.  Apparently the KGB spent years looking for what was hidden but could never find it.  Finally they meet with the descendant of the owner and offered him a percentage if he showed them where the treasure was stored.  He came back and the pendulum of the clock was apparently filled with diamonds.

Our walk through the city was interesting we spent almost an hour in Red Square hearing stories such as the Czars umbrella.  Apparently one of the Czars wanted to watch the normal citizens so he had an elaborate tower built on the wall of the Kremlin so he could look out and see the people.

As it started to get late and we had already walked across town, we decided to head out to a recently restored palace.  Tsaritsyno was a palace that was built for Catherine the Great.  However when she first saw it, she did not like it and demanded radical changes that left much of the palace to be destroyed and rebuilt.  The second incarnation of the building was complete, and ready to be furnished when Catherine died.  Her son not nearly as interested in adding another palace stopped all work and essentially mothballed the palace.  Since it was outside Moscow and the capital was St. Petersburg hardly a though was given to this palace as it slowly dissolved into a ruin.  The Mayor of Moscow made this one of his pet projects and restored the entire building close to its original intent with some added convinces such as electricity and enough lighting to make it seem like the middle of the day every day.  This palace even included a separate pavilion built for the purpose of watching fireworks over the ponds.  By this time it was nearly 1 in the morning so we boarded the last subway and headed home after a very long day of walking around Moscow.

The next morning we slept in after another long night and got a late.  Bill woke up early to go to the Postoffice with Alexey to register our visas and get some stamps for our postcards while I rested my still tired feet.  Registering the visa turned out to be an easy task, even if it did take two hours because of all the different lines that you are required to stand in.

After getting some food we headed into Red Square with the intent of going to St. Basil's Cathedral.  However, Red Square was closed for preparations for their upcoming Military Day.  So we thought we could walk around the Kremlin and get in from the other side.  We started walking along the wall and decided to just had for Christ the Savior Cathedral which was also rebuilt by the ambitious mayor of Moscow.  The largest cathedral in Russia it was torn down to build the tallest building in the world, only to become a year round out door swimming pool when funds were not available for such an ambitious sky scraper.  The cathedral was interesting, again build as close as possible to the original.

We had to return to Alexey's house to pick up our bags and were surprised to see no one at home.  We only had to wait five minutes when Alexey showed up and shared the bad news.  One of his cats Marussia had fallen from his patio and broke his back and front legs.  This is amazing since Alexey lives on the 9th floor.  We learned that the cat was scheduled for surgery the next day, which unfortunately did not repair the damage.  We spend some time consoling Alexey before we had to head to the train station to catch our train to St. Petersburg.  At the station we did the finger point and pantomine routine that has become a part of ordering food and hoped it would be decent train food (fortunately it was not too bad).

Started by Michelle, finished by Bill