Oh, you guys…I am in Minsk, but I am an IDIOT and you should all have a big laugh at my expense. I was kicked off the train at the Lithuanian-Belarusian border yesterday afternoon for not having purchased and printed ice hockey tickets in advance. That is apparently part of the visa-free deal and I think I might have actually heard that somewhere a while back, but in all the madness of this year, that important little fact got lost in my memory bank. Begging and pleading with the border guards and even a tactfully implied bribe got me absolutely nowhere. I was put in a small room at the border post and was soon joined by an older Lithuanian couple who were also booted from the same train for not having visas – they thought they wouldn’t need them because they were transiting through Belarus to Moscow. According to the border guards, we had to wait in said small room for five hours until the next northbound train came to take us back to Vilnius. Between us, we made many frantic phone calls and concocted some half-baked plans, but our fate was sealed. After an hour or so, we all pooled the little bit of food we had between us and shared it around. Then the husband pulled out a Lithuanian joke book from his bag and began translating EVERY SINGLE JOKE into Russian for us all to enjoy. Both the jokes and his translation skills left a lot to be desired, but I appreciated the effort and laughed extra hard at the two or three that were actually funny. We watched train after train pass in from Lithuania, but the only one we could board was the same train we came in on, after it had already left Minsk and collected a new load of passengers going back to Vilnius. At the beginning of the third hour, our ranks increased; a Lithuanian man in his late forties had also been refused for some reason, but I didn’t understand why because my Baltic cellmates had switched away from Russian upon establishing his nationality. The husband pointed at me and gave the man what I assume was a recap of my own tale of woe, and shortly thereafter the man started speaking to me in very good English. So we chatted for a while (he was also on his way to Moscow – another transit visa casualty) and the Lithuanian couple were now linguistically isolated, but this new guy had all the languages in the room. Since Russian was the only language we all shared, we used that for general chat, and then the guy maneuvered between English and Lithuanian when chatting with us individually. After a while, he brought out his own stash of chocolates to add to the almonds and pistachios I had offered with the wife’s home-baked cakes. We enjoyed our little impromptu buffet as the day wore on and I chipped away at my last uni essay in between bits of conversation and snacks. The whole time, I was trying to formulate my own plan. I would get back into Vilnius at 9:30pm (four hours after I was supposed to arrive in Minsk!) and I found out through a bit of chat with the border guards that there was one last Kaliningrad-Moscow train that would be passing through Vilnius and Minsk later on that night. If I were to try for that train, it would leave me a TINY window of time in which to buy hockey tickets online, find an internet café or a kind soul at the station to print them out, and then buy a brand-new train ticket to have another go at getting to Minsk. If that plan didn’t come together, I’d be looking at a cold and uncomfortable night in the Vilnius train station. After five hours had passed, our train of shame was approaching to take us back to Vilnius (with ALL the same onboard staff, who of course remembered us, how embarrassing!). When the border guards escorted us to the platform, my little crowd and I were all smiles and thanks. It wasn’t their fault, after all, and they had been pretty decent considering the circumstances. They waved goodbye to us (“happy deportation!”) and I said I hoped to see them again in a few hours. Meanwhile on the train, the trilingual man took over my case. I hadn’t even asked for his help, but as soon as we crossed back into an area with Lithuanian mobile coverage, he called his wife and son and asked them to get googling for internet cafes near the Vilnius train station. They phoned him back a few minutes later to report that they had come up with absolutely nothing, but the guy said, “don’t worry,” and when we arrived back into Vilnius and cleared customs again, he walked me straight to McDonald’s, international haven of wifi and toilets. While I fired up my computer and got started buying a hockey ticket online, he sweet-talked the staff into agreeing to use their manager’s computer to print off my e-ticket for me. I bought him a coffee for his trouble – I was so grateful, I would have purchased the entire menu for him, but he insisted that a coffee would do him fine. It took AGES for me to receive the e-ticket, but when it finally arrived in my inbox I transferred the pdf to my memory stick and handed it to my Lithuanian angel to print while I raced back to the station to buy a new train ticket to Minsk. By this time, it was 10:30pm – 15 minutes before the last train’s scheduled departure. They sold me a ticket, which they didn’t have to do because 15 minutes is the cutoff, so I raced out to the street, train ticket in hand just as my new friend was crossing the street from McDonald’s. He waved the hockey ticket in the air triumphantly and I burst out laughing, hardly able to believe that this crazy ‘plan B’ was coming together. I thanked him profusely as he handed me my memory stick and the document (which IS my Belarusian visa, basically) and we said our goodbyes. From there, I sprinted back into the station, sweated it through customs and passport control and breathlessly stumbled onto the train with three minutes to spare. We passed through the same Belarusian border post as before and all the same guards were still on duty. They congratulated me on my swift turnaround and told me to enjoy the hockey. My relief as the train pulled away from the Gudogai border post (with me on it!) was enormous. The helpful man and I exchanged business cards at some point during our temporary incarceration. I’m going to email him after I’ve had some sleep and insist that he let me take him and his family out to dinner on my return to Vilnius this Saturday. If they refuse that, I’d like to buy them a bottle of vodka at the very least! In the meantime, it’s USA vs. Latvia on Thursday evening for me, not to mention a double dose of utter shame for nearly having screwed this up so badly.
Posted on: Tue, 13 May 2014 00:53:08 +0000