St. Petersburg, Russia – 09/06 – The train saga continues

(Michelle) We were having a nice conversation with Dan and Rebecca and then we noticed the time. We had to get going to catch our train to Moscow. Of course it started raining and we couldn’t find the bus we were looking for, so we were running with our big packs on down Nevsky Prospekt.

We arrived at the train station 20 minutes before our train was supposed to leave, which would have been more than enough time if the train was leaving from that station. Since we couldn’t read our tickets (written in Russian), we had initially been concerned that we didn’t know which station to go to, since there are four in St. Petersburg. Our trusty Lonely Planet told us that every train to Moscow leaves from Moscova station, but we didn’t want to take that on faith alone, so we had picked up a local tourist brochure in English that said the same thing. Dan and Rebecca said that they had also read that from a different source… so we reluctantly believed it. We were wrong.

We arrived to see about 12 trains (they go all night long) to Moscow listed, not one of them was our train number. We were frantically trying to figure out where our train was and with about 5 minutes to spare, we saw a woman who looked like a tour guide based on some signs she was holding, and asked her if she knew why we couldn’t find our train. The answer was that it was at a different station of course. Great. No way we are going to make that now, so what can we do? It turns out that you can get some kind of refund on your ticket if you miss your train, so we at least didn’t lose out entirely on the fare we paid (because it was not cheap). Of course I waited in the wrong line first (with cutters) before getting to the right line for the refund. When I finally get to speak with the refund lady, I can’t say anything in Russian except please and thank you, so I just hand her the useless tickets and smile. She did not smile back, but she did hand me some money. So either the refund is 50% of the ticket price, or it is supposed to be more and she pocketed some, I will probably never know for sure and I was happy to get 50% as it was.

We decided to then utilize the special ticket room here - paying a few more bucks to avoid the lines (yes there are long lines at midnight) and try and get on a train still that night. Fortunately, we were able to get a spot on the 2am train. Since there are trains going all night, many of the restaurants were still open, so we got some potstickers from the Japanese restaurant and people watched until our train left.

(TJ) The potstickers were very good.