Travel to Russia, seeing auroras, St. Petersburg, etc.

[honu]

A lot of expats wouldn't be as taken with experiencing winter as Thais seem to be but auroras are something else, and there aren't many places to go to see those.  We visited Russia, partly to see Northern Lights in Murmansk, the largest town / city north of the Arctic Circle (with around 300,000 residents).

 

Auroras are amazing to experience, of course, but hard to describe, beyond the basics, being shifting light patterns in the sky of varying color and intensity.  Winter is by far the best time to see auroras, but also not really an ideal time to be in the Russian cities since it's cold and grey out, and parks and gardens aren't much to see.  Russian culture was also interesting, and just seeing Moscow and St. Petersburg.  I grew up during the Cold War so Russia (USSR) had that high profile as a main adversary, and it was interesting to get a look around.  Somehow Vietnam seems just as swept up in communist themes these days, and it's a lot more accessible from here.  We visited an interesting space museum, and there was more around related to history (Stalin's bunker, etc.) that we didn't get to.  Russians might be seen as a bit somber given they're at the opposite end of the spectrum as Thais related to putting on a cheerful public image.

 

It could even be a moderately priced trip, if you knew how to make the right trade-offs.  We stayed in two Ibis hotels and the most developed hotel in Murmansk, which provides that setting as modern and Western, but it would be easy to deal with a bit less in terms of look and feel.  Of course it is the West, so in a sense that part drops out as a concern, but a slightly different form than the US or Western Europe.  Tour guide services would probably be necessary in Murmansk, since you can't see the auroras from the city due to light pollution, but it would be possible to do research and keep related costs to a minimum.  Given how much of the trip was travel-theme related (using subways, taking a train, etc.) my kids loved it, and some of the cultural experience was perfect for them (the circus), with other parts not as idea (the ballet).  Due to how import taxes work out in Thailand versus other countries lots of things cost a lot less, and it would probably now be a much better shopping alternative to Singapore, which has long since became expensive to visit, compared to a decade ago.  I wrote a blog post summary about all of it, with lots of pictures of what we saw and did.  

 

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2018/01/travel-in-russia-to-moscow-st.html

 

 

 

[mogandave]

Looks like you had a great trip.

How’d you like the food?


Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect

[honu]

My family wasn't good about exploring the range of food there.  We had some nice local Russian food but tried very little of it.  My son really wanted to eat KFC for every meal and my wife and her mother kept craving rice, related to Thais not feeling full unless they eat rice with every meal, except when they want to make an exception for rice noodle soup.  So we'd seek out the rare Chinese food restaurants there, which were selling really bad interpretations of Chinese food, sometimes in a food style that mixed Chinese and Japanese foods, which makes no sense. 

 

We had really delicious and inexpensive Greek food once but they avoided trying anything similar again for whatever reason.  Western foods cost less than in Bangkok, and the quality seemed higher in general, so it worked out to eat foods like burgers (not McDonald's, real food), or fish and chips.  Some traditional Russian foods were just variations of what I grew up on in the states, like combining roasted meat and vegetables more or less as stew.

 

I tried borscht; it was ok, just beet soup.  Sometimes other odd options would come up, like a fried food that looked like a giant version of a pierogi.  It was nice just being back to a place where cheese wasn't an expensive and rare delicacy and a range of different types of breads were just considered normal bread.  Sometimes I'd skip eating plain hotel food and come by some extra down-time by making a ham and cheese sandwich instead.

 

I wouldn't claim that we're good at traveling, even though we have enough practice that we should be.  We don't do justice to exploring local foods and overemphasize visiting major sights at the expense of not embracing variety.  Bringing young kids everyone adds to the level of difficulty; the logistics of dealing with cold weather gear was a bit much.

[Gruff]

Visa is a problem to Russia unless on a package trip

 

 

[honu]

The visa part was complicated.  You need a letter of invitation of sorts, which is quite easy to come by on a package trip coordinated by a certified travel agent, and more complicated otherwise. 

 

There are agencies that specialize in such things, though, so it would mostly only come down to buying the service of someone putting that paperwork together. 

 

The one restriction is that your travel plans really are supposed to be quite fixed, as part of the visa registration process.  If you want to travel as a backpacker does, and just go wherever you happen to go, on whatever time-table, using any hotel or guestroom you run across, that doesn't match up at all with the registration process required.