It’s only 4 days!

Looking at the number of things I do recently I can’t believe I am able to do them. CD release, rehearsals, gym workouts, trip preparations, work, where I have to pass my duties for the whole month. During last days I wake up at 9 AM and go to sleep at 3 AM – 18 hrs per day on the highest pace. I cheer myself up that next week I will get bored to death – I will sleep, look through the window, read, talk, drink vodka, play cards, nothing else. More, I think I will lose the sense of time and will not feel all these long periods in the train. Which is actually good, as the boredom is the biggest disadvantage according to all the stories about Transsib I read.

The day before yesterday I picked the passports with visas. This shit is really expensive. 2 visas (Russia, China) for 2 people – €400 less. Russia have probably the most expensive visas in the world.

I am also more and more into the term that Russia is not the country, it’s the state of mind.
The closest example is the game with purchasing train tickets through rzd.ru. I have been using plastics for many years, locally and abroad, I have travelled nearly whole Europe, a piece of Asia and Africa and have never had a mayor problems with paying without the cash. Here, to buy 3 rail tickets I used 4 different cards. The most common error code I got after entering all PINs, codes, passwords was “Invalid Card Status” and it didn’t matter that I had just successfully paid for another ticket. Error is error.
Each of the cards I had I could use only once.
When I emailed the bank (VBT24 in this case) and described the problem I got very prompt answer “your problem is not possible to be solved through e-mail, please call us directly”.
Yeah, sure…

Just in case, I also checked the balance of each card, just to make sure if the error transactions hadn’t “accidentally” sucked off the money, luckily all was good.

So, besides the visas, with the trials and errors I managed to buy all the train tickets for Russia, namely: Moscow – Novosibirsk, Novosibirsk – Irkutsk, Vladivostok – Irkutsk. We will deal with the international transportation on the fly – it gives a bit of insecurity yet it leaves the space for the spontaneity.

What next? I need to work over the blog a bit today, for you to could read me, tomorrow I say goodbye to my work for a month (read: I have to foresee what can happen within a month and prevent any possible problems not to have to search for the Internet on the other edge of the world), on Saturday the final shopping/money exchange, Sunday is the concert and we leave on Monday.
Packing has started last week, now I have a bit of a journey mess on my desk 🙂