Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Nothing goes as planned here...

It is a well known fact that over here nothing ever goes as planned and if you are ever going to get anything done it will be a huge long process.

Yesterday Polina and I met up to get train tickets for St. Petersburg for when my sis is in town. Well I should have known that it would not turn out well by how it started out. I waited (needing to go to the bathroom by the way and there is no such thing as a public bathroom except at Mc Donalds) for about 45 minutes on Polina at the metro because she went to the wrong metro. This is funny since she is the native here and I'm the foreigner. She forgets where we are supposed to be and is headed to the wrong train station. So we finally get ahold of eachother and and hour later are headed to the correct train station.

While we are there we wait in line for about an hour. Only to find out there are ABSOLUETLY NO TICKETS LEFT! We even try to be flexible with our travel dates but nothing. So we leave the train station and head across town to the Transportation Authority. Apparently they sell tickets too. Well, they are suposed to.

Have I ever told you that it is rare to get this thing called Customer Service over here. It just rarely exists. Silly me to think that this was going to be a day where it did exist. Nope. We got there and there was one lady at the desk selling tickets. She was on her cell phone talking. Yea so about 10 minutes later she decides to get off of her cell phone and help us. She tells us there are no tickets left on the sleeping train but there are 5 tickets left on the train that sits up like airplane seats. We decide it will not be fun but we will take the tickets. They were only like $15 as opposed to $60 each way. So I guess that is a plus.

Well, of course her cell phone rings, AGAIN. Of course, she answers it. We had already told her we want the 4 tickets. But apparently she didn't type it in. So 5 minutes late when she decides to get off of her cell phone, guess what?! THE TICKETS ARE GONE! That is how quickly they are selling out (and they have only been on sale for a week). Polina and I are so furious at her that we just leave and head to McDonalds for some ice cream and a cola light.

So about 2 and a half hours later, we still have no tickets to St. Petersburg. Well caffiene and ice cream can do wonders. We settled down and I headed to Bible study. I decided to look online for plane tickets, figuring they would be way too expensive. Nope! There were the same price as the sleeping train tickets!

So today I bought round trip plane tickets to St. Petersburg for $134 per person. The flight will only be 1 hour as opposed to 8 hours on a train. Though I wanted Sara to have the experience of sleeping on a train, at least we can still go! God is so nice to me!

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