Value Apatheid
Astrakhan (May 1998). "Go to hell along with your hotel!" Enraged, I stormed out of the hall and dragged Anna with. After a few years ago Russia was hardly a situation in which I was really angry. The young woman at the front had made it. Completely emotionless, she had insisted that I use for my half of a double room, we wanted to rent, should pay twice as much as my wife for her. Foreigner price. So that was just in Russia.
Hotel "Lotos", was a great block and right on the bank of the Volga, and only a few steps from the white of Astrakhan Kremlin a thoroughly Soviet house and still a best addresses in town. On the river banks were lined up the small places where all kinds of fish were prepared. At garden chairs could on the last kilometers of the Volga look before it reached the Caspian Sea, to drink a Pepsi-Cola and eat fried sturgeon with French fries. The breakfast in the "lotus" was served on the Roof, mashed potatoes with sausages and ketchup - so could not start the day well. Evening two young men knocked on the door and asked me if I would not chance something, "relax." An inappropriate range for my honeymoon, I thought.
just behind the burning garbage containers no foreigner price
In the "lotus" it went to the way in hundreds of other Russian provinces. Prostitutes, cooked Würtschen with mashed potatoes for breakfast, a "women's floor" on each floor, bath seat - and of course a peppered special price for foreigners. So it was just normal. Upon our arrival I had with the price-apartheid but no longer want to resign. My call for the same price remained unheard, angry growling of constitutional violation and disregarded laws had no effect, not even a Russian student card would have brought the price closer to Russians.
So we left the "lotus", I left Anna with the luggage back on a park bench on the Volga and the hotels would run around fast. United was not the selection. A hotel in downtown was closed for renovation, in the other a few years ago Anna had once stayed with a girlfriend - and witnessed unknown attempted at night, from the outside to go into her room. There remained a third address in walking distance. Also situated on the Volga river. However, I lost my way in a settlement from run-down apartment blocks.
"Where is it here to the hotel?" I finally asked two boys playing in the dusty street football. They were very helpful and told me the way: "Behind the blue panel to the right, to the burning garbage containers over," they pointed to the black Smoke cloud on the end of the road. "There it is." The hotel was it really, it was not even a foreigner deal, because probably over dared hardly alien to the burning pile of garbage. Somehow inappropriate for a honeymoon.
There seemed to be a major embarrassment: An hour after I had run furiously to brag from the "lotus", we were way out for lack of crushed back to the reception. I threw my passport at the reception desk. "A single night," I said as unfriendly. "Tomorrow we go to another city." The Volga was finally long enough.
This sentence was unexpected effect. With a loud clatter printed the reception woman from our account - and lo and behold at once our double room cost only ordinary domestic prices. We have not had much opportunity to breakfast sausages on the roof terrace to enjoy.
No ticket counter at the station
slowly disappeared in the nineties, the discrimination of foreign price of Russian life. Soon there was only one flight ticket price for all the hotels in big cities, especially the expensive, accustomed from the tariff-apartheid. Other bodies were found to be bastions of the old order. The Kremlin Museums and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg demanded by foreign Guests sometimes ten times for a ticket. What the early nineties, perhaps justified might have been more bizarre with each passing year.
For foreigners, it was almost impossible to pass the entrance ticket to Russian control. The clothes, the facial features, the look, the way in which the camera was hung around the shoulder, there were hundreds of little things that betray the foreigner, even if he is good Russian language, or counted the money for the Russians map exactly onto the counter had set. Friends from the West, that I tried it but had to leave before carefully instruct. If they like the shirts stuck in his pants and otherwise made no mistakes, we made it sometimes.
The railway, however, were all the tricks from the start Love's Labour's Lost. In order to combat the rampant black market tickets, tickets since the early nineties, only upon presentation of passport sold, the name was written on the ticket. When boarding the train the guard could check the papers. It was therefore particularly galling that the train slowly separated from the special treatment for foreigners. At some point the fare is well aligned. But tickets to foreigners have been shared only with a few special funds sold, but not normal at the counters.
was in Moscow this System even partially beneficial. In place of the three stations for example, where the snakes accepted in the summer months enormous proportions, the higher ticket sales took place at the foreign box office one floor often only a few minutes. Elsewhere, the situation is not so pleasant. In the city of Rostov-on-Don million could buy about a foreigner at the train station at all any tickets. The only switch, where that was possible, was in the office of the former Soviet state company "Intourist". And that was about five kilometers from the railway station.
Moreover must be noted in fairness that the foreigners do not represent the prices of the Russians summit of the impossible. As in some other situations, the Ukrainians put their big brothers in the shade. In the Kiev hotels were at the same time, three price groups: the least the Ukrainians paid themselves, Russians and visitors from other former Soviet republics had to dig deeper into their pocket and pays most of course also clients from the "Far Abroad" for the same performance .
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