Monday, July 20, 2009

tips for buying train tickets in russia

lessons we've learned so far for buying russian train tickets and not really speaking russian:

- writing down in cyrillic the destination, date, desired class, and desired train is very helpful

- make sure to write the date with day.month (roman numerals or preferably spelled out in russian).year. use "." between the day, month, year, do not use "/" between the day, month, year. using "/" can result in buying a ticket for the wrong month, as happened to us. we asked for a ticket for july (VII) and got one leaving in august (VIII).

- specify which train you want, either by train number or departure time (research online before going to the ticket office). writing "afternoon" (in russian) leads to some interesting facial expressions and complete confusion.

- pay in cash, even if there is a visa/master card label on the window. we have no idea what the purpose of those stickers are, but if you hand them a credit card as i did, be prepared to hear some a very exaspirated string of russian and then a quick run to the nearest ATM machine to withdraw lots of cash.

- always double check your tickets after receiving them. even with an english speaking ticket seller and an explanation of the ticket, we discovered that we purchased tickets for the day after we wanted to depart (july 29th instead of july 28th).

- outside of major cities (st. petersburg and moscow) you can only buy international tickets for trains originating from that city (ie cannot buy tickets for trains leaving from ulan ude from irkutsk). makes planning more difficult.

this list to be updated as we buy more train tickets...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

How about tips for buying train tickets in Spain - from Madrid to Barcelona? I went to the renfe English site but pointed me right back into Spanish! sigh...

If you have time recommendations for Barcelona would be highly appreciated.