Trans-siberian

Russia is a gigantic country and thus is divided into several time zones. Even so, the time references in every railway station and on train tickets are on Moscow time, regardless of where the ticket was bought.

We sometimes got confused and always double checked our departure times, just making sure we added the right amount of hours to the time indicated on the ticket. We never missed a train…

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Once you enter Russia you have to get your visa registered within 3 business days, if you don't do it and get caught you might run into troubles, most likely get fined. You'll have to register as well in every city where your spend more than 3 days, this is to prevent internal migration and terrorism. You also have to keep all your train tickets to prove when you arrived in a place.

Usually your …

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As I mentioned earlier we arrived in Russia with nothing but an hostel reservation, so once in the place we had to get ourselves some train tickets to move around. Easier said then done. Do not bet on finding someone that might speak english and understand what you need, you'll loose. Instead what we did is asking our host to write down a note with what we needed, namely 4 kupé tickets to Moscow…

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Before leaving I was very worried about crossing the Russian border, not that I had any reason to, but all the paperwork was such a mess I expected something similar to happen at the customs. But entering the country was as simple as it could get, the officer looked at our passports for about 5 seconds and let us in, I suddenly felt very stupid to have worried that much.

None of us had ever bee…

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