After waking up at the indecent hour of 7.15am, and with Alice coming along for moral support, we settled into our by now familiar route to the airport: metro from Vladimirskaya to Technologicheski Institut, change there for a line out to Moskovskaya station, from Moskovskaya catch 39 or 11 bus to Pulkovo 1 terminal. Takes about 1 hour each way (with luck), costs 132 roubles for 2 people.
At the airport we walked around in circles for a bit looking either for an information counter, a lost and found office, or a way back through the customs booth (which is typically unmanned) back to the office where our forms had been filed the other day. Eventually we found the lost and found on the departure side of the airport and presented my bit of paper labelled ‘Property Irregularity Report’.
And that’s when things got interesting.
‘Do you have your Coostoms form?’ says the blue-skirted lady.
‘No. What?’ says I.
‘Your coostoms form. Decaration’, she says, motioning for a piece of paper about the size and shape of the one I had been given the other day, and which I had not realised I would need to bring back with me.
‘Oh this is bad, very bad. They may not let you claim baggage’, says blue skirt.
‘But the form only said that we have nothing to declare’ says Alice. ‘What do they need it for?’
So we motioned general tourist cluelessness and suggested that we get someone at the hostel to find the form in out bags and fax it to the customs people, at which point the lady simply decided that they would let me fill out two more forms dated today (not the day I arrived) and submit those as immigration papers to claim my bag. In other words they promptly recognised that the whole thing was ridiculous, and that the immigration form if anything was intended to show that I was actually in the country, because of course I needed to be in the country to claim my bag.
Then we went for an entertaining tour through the back parts of the airport with the blue-skirt lady, to the cage of lost baggage, where we established that my bag was not there, and we came through some other doors out to the other (arrivals) side of the airport which was exactly where we had been standing the other day. Blue-skirt went to grab the on-duty customs officer in his convincing green-suit uniform, instructing us to ‘Just wait here’. Which we did.
They went over to a little counter and discussed the bits of paper, and then we were motioned over to join the fun.
‘Something something or other Po-Russkiye?’ green-suit asked me (Do you speak any Russian?)
‘Nope.’
‘There is a mistake here.’ He says. (No. There’ s no mistake. There’s no such thing.)
‘We are not in Mongolia,’ he says. On the ‘Coostoms form’ there is a section for ‘Country of Origin’, in our case Germany, and one for ‘Country of Destination’, for which I mistakenly put ‘Mongolia’, as that was where we were going next. We found my backpack in the cage full (FULL) of stuff, and checked through to make sure everything was there. The top padlock was open; the bottom one was missing. Or in other words, customs in Germany saw the collection of pills forming my South East Asia kit and couldn’t resist opening it. And because we checked in late my bag missed the plane. But all the same we had the bag back.
And then it was bus metro and metro back to the hostel, where we waited around til midday to check out, all the while hoping our passports would return from being photocopied by the Intrepid guide, but they didn’t. At Moskovsky Vokzal we put our large bags in storage for the day and after lunch walked up to the Hermitage with one of the guys from the group who had been in town a few days but held off on the Hermitage hoping someone from the group would want to go. And go we did.
In the normal course of events, we would have devoted the whole day to the Hermitage, just as with the Louvre, and then fit in what we could afterwards. With the bag debacle we couldn’t, but all the same we had a pretty good go at taking in as much of the art and architecture as we could. The building itself, being the Tsar’s old winter palace, could be a museum; the fact that it’s filled with paintings, sculptures, and artifacts, including a surprising number of rooms dedicated to showing how the Tsars lived, and very surprising number of Picassos, was really just gravy. A lot of gravy. Also our next dead person for the tour: the hermitage had a real dead Egyptian mummy on display.
In the evening, knowing we had to be at the station by 10.15 for the train to Moscow, we finished off with a stroll through the magnificent Summer Gardens, pausing along the way to giggle at local teenagers warming themselves up by standing near the huge and unguarded eternal flame in the Mars Field. One trip to the supermarket later we joined the group and formed a little refugee camp on the floor of the station, something which seems to be a signpost for local drunks to bother us. And also I think some guy tried to convince me to bribe him after I ran out on to a big roundabout through lots of traffic to get a really good photo looking down the Nevsky Prospect. He said a bunch of stuff in Russian I didn’t understand, and when I explained that I don’t speak Russian it sounded like he said ‘police help money’. So then we walked the other way; after all some dude in a Puma tracksuit isn’t really that convincing.
The train itself was incredibly crowded; 4 bunks (2 up 2 down) facing each other, and on the other wall 2 bunks longways. In between; a hallway. No doors. No compartments. Every bunk full. But it proved to be surprisingly comfortable, and also we were a bit stunned when the man on the bun above us said ‘Excuse me, what country are you from?’, are we were further amused when halfway through our conversation about Russian and Australian weather, people, and language he pointed to the Russian-English phrasebook we were trying to learn some authentic pronunciation out of and said ‘In Russia, you don’t need this.’
‘Put the book away then?’
‘Yes, yes, in Russia you don’t need this.’
And in the morning – Moscow.
Greg
