Buying a Train Ticket, Russian Styles

Train Station in Kazan

As we are on the Trans-Mongolian train heading all the way across Russia, Mongolia and into China, and stopping frequently it is necessary for us to buy lots of train tickets. Seeing Russia is an awesome place, they’ve made it not possible to buy an open ended ticket that allows you to say have unlimited rides for a month or whatever. Instead you have to buy a ticket each time you want to take the train and buying up a stack of tickets isn’t possible as we don’t know our sleeping arrangements either. So basically we have to buy a train ticket each time we wish to ride a train. This would be no problem in any normal country. I did it in Germany last month without any problems; I’ve done it before in the USA without too many issues either. But the big difference is that these places are used to foreigners, Russia is not. It often feels as though we are the first foreign people to ever come on this type of adventure.

Example ticket request

We start out by writing down in Cyrillic the destination, date, time, class and number of tickets we’d like on a piece of paper. Luckily we’ve learnt enough Cyrillic to do this comfortably. Next we head to the Kacci (ticket office) with the information, phrasebook, money and passport in hand. After waiting in the poorly formed Russian queue for a while, we politely say ‘dobriy dyehn’ (good afternoon) to the ticket lady, then hold up the piece of paper with details on it to the window and say our destination. Next either one of the following two outcomes happens. The most likely thing to happen on the first attempt is for the old grumpy lady to say het (sounds like ‘nyeht’) which means no. Without having a load of other options we try again but usually get another ‘het’. If this happens we just have to give up and either wait in another line for a nicer lady or wait until she has gone off her break and been replaced with someone else. The other possible outcome is that the ticket lady is actually helpful, which seems rather unlikely and helps us. Usually they’ll speak loads of Russia which we’ve no idea what they are saying, then we’ll signal for the lady to write down the details of the train she seems to be booking in. Usually this process goes alright and we get a train that is within the time and price of what we’d like. Lately we’ve also been trying to ask for certain seat numbers, as we’re riding third class which means half the seats available are terrible. Unfortunately we rarely succeed at getting good seats. After this we wait for the word passport to be said by the lady. Then we hand them over for her to get our details which are helpfully written down in Cyrillic on our Russian visas. Finally she’ll write down the price and we hand over some ridiculous amount of roubles which usually works out very good in New Zealand dollars. (A typical 10 hour overnight train is about 500-800 roubles each which is about $25-$40, awesome value for the distance.) A quick double check at the printed out ticket results in a job complete and a new destination with grasp.