Two days to prepare the train trip
7 and 8 January 2015
7th and 8th January is Orthodox Christmas. My agenda: buy a train ticket to Khabarovsk, go shopping for extra shoes and gloves, and attend a mass in the Pokrovsky Cathedral.
I start with buying the train ticket. In the Netherlands all websites warn that train tickets must be purchased over the internet in advance, because once in Russia you pay double prices and the trains are fully booked.
All nonsense. I walk up to a cashier who asks when do I want to travel. On the 9th? OK, and do I pay in cash or credit card? 2600 Rubel please. That’s less than half the price I would have paid on the internet.
But there is one difficulty with buying a ticket locally and it has to do with the precise timing. For whatever reason all clocks on the main Russian railway stations show Moscow time. Figure this: you’re walking outside the railway station and your phone says 10:00 in the morning. You enter the railway station and the clock on the wall reads 03:00. Yes, that is the time difference between Moscow and Vladivostok. Now you tell the cashier you want to leave in two day around 8 in the morning. So she prints a tickets and it says: leave just after midnight.
It requires some mental acrobatics to get this right. Look at the next photo, taken inside the Vladivostok railway station. The exif-data in my camera say it is 7th January, 03:39, that is Amsterdam time. In Vladivostok it is nine hours later i.e. 12:39, lunchtime. And indeed, I was at the railway station somewhere around noon. Now check the clock on the wall: it reads 05:39. Yep, that’s 05:39 Moscow time again. Handy, no? I think no.
The Russians must have developed this mental flexibility to rapidly do the math, but I got lost each and every time.
I went to a street market to buy better shoes, an extra pair of pants that I can wear on top of everything I already wear, plus gloves, better gloves. The street market is the domain of Chinese traders. Then I went to the GUM which is a Russian department store. They are in all major cities and they sell everything. Plenty personnel again, and they have plenty time to help.
I also went to the main basilique to attend an Orthodox Christmas mass. I am Catholic and our masses take an hour, maybe ninety minutes but that’s about it. Orthodox masses seem to never end, it feels like an ongoing event and people walk in and out all the time. I couldn’t figure out when it had started or when it would end, I guess it ends on the 9th or 10th when Orthodox Christmas is over. I asked a pope if I could take some photos, “is ok” he said, yes the pope speaks English also. In our Dutch Catholic churches the average visitor is relatively old, fifty or over, but here everybody shows up, young and old.
That was it. Time to get on the train.
