Christmas + Holiday to Russia

Hello again!

Over the Christmas break we had the chance to fulfill a longtime dream of visiting Russia!  It was a wonderful trip and definitely worthy of a few blog posts to share some of our adventures!  I will try to keep these posts a little more brief than my previous ones and let the photos do the talking.  However, I'm going to break that rule right off the bat with some background on how we came to plan a trip to the coldest country in the world in December.

In 2011 we invited Isabel and Tom to spend Christmas with us in Edinburgh.  As soon as they decided to come we started talking about going on a trip together between Christmas and New Year.  


Planning


We briefly discussed the possibility of visiting Russia but quickly dismissed it as too cold and too complicated.  We all agreed that a sun holiday would be best and I began researching potential trips.  Over the next month or so I worked my way through the planning stages of trips to Egypt, Turkey, Tenerife, Cyprus and Morocco.  A series of flight timing and price issues, the realisation that the weather might not be reliably hot in all of these places, and the continued unstable political situation in Egypt caused to us to abandon each of these options in turn and finally realise that we were not destined to have the hot beach experience we had imagined.  


The next idea was to go on a trip to Germany and Austria.  Perhaps we could embrace the cold?  In the midst of planning that trip the idea of going to Russia was revived.  If we couldn’t have hot we might as well do cold properly!  Although the Chernoff family had immigrated to Canada in 1897, Graham and his Dad had always wanted to visit Russia and this year seemed as good an opportunity as we might have to do it.  We made the final decision to travel to Russia in early October and rushed to pull together the information needed for visa applications.  


The visa process was our first glimpse into the complexity of arranging this trip.  Our application required us to list every country we had visited in the past 10 years, the details of our last three employers (an item that required Isabel and Tom to go back to the 1970s!) and many other obscure details.  

We had to get custom sized passport photos and pay a travel company to issue us an invitation to visit Russia.  Isabel & Tom’s process was three times more expensive and took three times as long as ours because their visa application had to be facilitated by a travel company with connections to the Russian consulate in Ottawa.  These complications meant that we ended up having to take a leap of faith and book flights and hotels as we nervously waited for the visas to come through.  On December 7th we finally received an e-mail from Isabel which read “I HAVE THE VISAS IN MY HOT LITTLE HAND!!J”.  Relief!  Now we could really start to get excited!

Flight research was also a challenge.  As usual, we were attempting to orchestrate an epic holiday on a shoestring budget.  The winter timing meant that most budget airlines flying east had suspended their services.  A direct flight from London to Moscow was a no go with flights priced at over £700 per person each way.  Several marathon flight website searching sessions later and Nathalie discovered that Norwegian Airlines still had a reasonable offer on their Boxing Day flight from Edinburgh to Copenhagen.  Less than 24 hours later there was also a reasonably priced flight from Copenhagen to Moscow on Aeroflot (the famed Russian national airline).  Success!  This option was especially attractive as it would allow us to spend an afternoon with Nathalie’s family and even drop in on the annual Boxing Day lunch!  And both flights were only £215 per person!

The next hurdle was figuring out how to get from Moscow to St Petersburg.  We knew that we couldn’t visit Russia without taking in those two fabled cities.

Here Graham’s train website skills reached new heights.

In our time in the UK we have developed something of a reputation for finding good train prices.  Of course this skill is somewhat necessary given that Nathalie spends half her life on trains between Edinburgh and Lancaster and down to London for research.  So, it seemed worthwhile to at least try to find out what the Russia train situation would be.  Initial research on English language travel websites informed us that there were many options for train travel between the two cities.  

The night train between St Petersburg and Moscow has traditionally been the way that most Russians travel between the two cities.  Our limited time in Russia made this option very attractive.  Some further research using the incredibly useful Seat61.com train travel website helped us decide that we wanted to travel on the iconic Red Arrow service.  From this point Graham decided to take things to the next level.  Not wanting to pay some kind of surcharge for the travel website’s booking of the trains Graham decided to use his rudimentary knowledge of Cyrillic to check the actual Russian train company website.  There he discovered that the English language website was in fact padding the ticket price by about £40 per ticket.  Well this would not do for Cheapo-Mc-Cheaperson, no no.  Far better for him to spend hours and hours carefully reading the terms and conditions and train timetables on the Russian website and checking everything with Google translator!

Needless to say I was more than a bit weary of this direct booking proposition but Graham was not to be dissuaded.  So, late one November night while I was in Lancaster, and the train tickets had finally been posted for sale on the Russian website, Graham logged in to book our tickets.  The ticket purchase actually took three tries.  The first try failed because our Canadian Mastercard was not having any of it.  A call to Mastercard to explain the admittedly bonkers situation should have solved it. 

A failed second try followed by an hour delay while the Russian train ticket site went offline for servicing (it was 3 am Moscow time after all!) and Graham finally had to put the purchase through the website while on the phone with a Mastercard agent who approved it manually and we had our overnight train tickets to St Petersburg!

I will add here that this approach to travel planning is not one that I recommend to anyone who isn’t relatively crazy.  If you want to go to Russia call your local travel agent (ideally my mum), pay the surcharges here and there and know that the service you are getting is not for nothing!!  And no, the irony of having a travel agent for a mother/mother-in-law and still putting ourselves through these hoops is not lost on us.

The final planning stages involved finding a way to leave St Petersburg and booking accommodation.  Suffice to say for now that we found out that Estonian Airlines had very reasonable flights from St Petersburg to Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) with onward connections to many other European destinations.  We also did a lot of research on accommodation and booked a combination of hostels and hotels.  More on those later. 

Now, to the photos!


Christmas


Isabel and Tom arrived in Edinburgh on December 16th and we had a wonderful week showing them around our city and enjoying all of the festive activities going on. 

Our first ever Christmas tree in our own home!

Isabel and Tom at lunch at the Dome on George Street
(aka Christmassy-est place in the world)

Lunch at the Dome

Wrapping up Christmas cookies for the neighbours 

Starting our multiple course Christmas dinner with soup, salmon and prosecco! 

Copenhagen

We flew to Copenhagen on December 26th and made our way to Gentofte for Boxing Day Danish meal with my cousins at my aunt Hanne’s flat.  In the evening Hanne lent us her car to drive into the city centre and show Isabel and Tom the main sights.  Wonderful wonderful Copenhagen!

The next morning we had a few hours in the city centre before we went back to the airport to catch our flight to Moscow.

Isabel and Tom on Rødhus Plassen on a very rainy morning in Copenhagen.

Lego Santa! 

G and Tom on Christmassy looking Stroget 

Enjoying our surprise meal on the Aeroflot flight

Going through customs in Moscow
(when Isabel took this photo I was sure they'd send me to the Gulag!)

Sweet relief that our visas were accepted and we are in Russia!!

A preview for the next post about what we saw on our first day in Moscow....

nb: All photos with time stamps were taken by Isabel.