Lost in Moscow: Reissuing an Immigration Card
Source: Russian Cultural Center
Today is the day my travel partners switch out. Seungjun, who has been roughing it with me, is heading to St. Petersburg first, and my girlfriend is taking time off to fly into Moscow. Since he leaves for the airport in the morning and she arrives at night, I decided to use the downtime to reissue the Russian immigration card I lost on the train. Russia doesn't require a special customs declaration or a visa for Koreans, but everyone entering the country receives a small slip of paper called an immigration card. You always need this paper to check into a hotel. I don't know if it slipped out during the passport check on the train or if they took it and never gave it back, but I lost it then and now I can't get my hotel room key. (From my experience, hostels will let it slide, but the more expensive the hotel, the stricter they are about this.)
Are you just showing off that it's expensive?
First, I asked the hotel staff in English, "Where can I get an immigration card?" and explained it again with body language. They scribbled an address on a notepad and told me to go there. But it wasn't an exact address, just a general district. When I asked exactly where it was, they said they didn't know either.
Hey, you [bleep], what am I supposed to do?
Eventually, I explained the whole situation to my friend Timur in St. Petersburg. He found the police station in that area and sent me an exact map. It was a one-hour round trip on foot.
30 minutes in: I took two subway lines, got off, and walked to the vicinity, but I couldn't figure out which building it was. Government offices in Russia don't scream "I AM A GOVERNMENT BUILDING!!!!" with distinct architecture like they do in Korea or other East Asian countries. Whether it's an apartment, a supermarket, or a public office, they all look pretty much the same, and the signs are tiny. It's incredibly difficult for a first-timer to navigate. To make matters worse, when I showed the address and map to passersby to ask for directions, every single person pointed me in a different direction. At this point, I started worrying if the address and map I was holding were even correct.
1 hour and 30 minutes in: I finally found the police station. I feel like I circled every building in the neighborhood. As soon as I walked in, there was an iron gate guarded by a police officer armed with a rifle, and of course, he didn't speak English. He gave me a nod with a look that said, "Who are you and why are you here?" I showed him my passport and said, "lost immigration card." He looked flustered but let me inside. Once inside, I kept repeating "lost immigration card" to anyone I could find, which triggered a classic Russian "internal huddle." A few officers started speaking to each other in Russian that sounded like incantations, then put on serious faces and started looking for someone who spoke English. About 15 minutes later, an English speaker arrived and told me this wasn't their jurisdiction. I had to go back to the hotel and visit the police station in the hotel's district. A new address was shoved into my hand.
2 hours and 30 minutes in: I returned to the hotel area and went to the place the police told me about. Some security guard gave me that same "Who are you and why are you here?" look, muttered something in Russian, and then shut and locked the door. Seeing that he had absolutely no intention of helping, I gave up and went back to the hotel. Looking completely dumbfounded, I called the manager over and recounted every step of my miserable journey. Then I just plopped down on the sofa with a "You gave me the wrong info, so I'm done trying, figure it out" attitude. The manager said this was a first for him too, asked me to sit tight, and started busily making phone calls. I don't know if this will get resolved today.
3 hours in: This time, a plainclothes police officer actually came to the hotel. He handed me some paperwork and told me to fill it out.
I need to know what it is to fill it out.
The hotel manager offered to translate: the officer would speak in Russian, the manager would translate it into English, and I was supposed to write it down in Korean. And so began a game of writing a loss report, played like a guessing game by three people with weak language skills. Judging by the English translation, the gist was "No one stole it; I lost it due to my own carelessness." Since neither of them could read Korean anyway, and no one would know if I wrote curses or praises, I just made up a story and handed over the report. The rough content was: "I lost it on the train, no one stole it, I wasn't robbed, I lost it myself, so I want it reissued." For the record, I have no idea if this is the right way to write it. I just wrote what I heard.
3 hours and 30 minutes in: The police officer who came to the hotel diligently filled out some paperwork on his own, then announced he was done. He said I just needed to ride with him in the police car to the station, pick up a document, and take it to the immigration office, and that would be it. He wrote down the immigration office address for me in advance, and it was completely different from the one the manager had given me earlier. When I asked why the addresses were different, he said the immigration office and the police station are separate. That manager, seriously...
True to his plainclothes status, we rode in a regular unmarked Russian police car and arrived at the station.
Police or not, they easily hit 100km/h in the alleys here.
This police station had a completely different vibe from the first one I visited. Inside, there was a jail-like holding cell and an interrogation room straight out of a movie. The station itself looked smaller, but the atmosphere felt like they handled much heavier
violent crimes?
cases. The officer who brought me to this intense place told me to wait five minutes and his manager would give me the document, then he just vanished, leaving me alone. (Of course, all this communication was handled with "Five minute, he" and a "handing something over" gesture.)
Looking at the Russian holding cell, it wasn't open with just iron bars like in Korea; it had a solid iron door like a real prison, and they even kept all the lights off except for one tiny bulb by the entrance. It must have been bathroom break time, because an officer unlocked the door and sent the prisoner inside to the restroom. Even as he sent him, the officer kept barking at the detained man (it sounded like, "Don't look around, just go to the bathroom!") and jabbing him in the ribs. The Chinese people waiting nearby and I all quietly lowered our eyes or stared at the ceiling, trying our hardest not to make eye contact with him. While he was in the bathroom, I caught a quick glimpse inside the cell—it was a solitary confinement room with absolutely nothing in it. Plus, there were no lights, making me think you'd at least sleep really well in there. A holding cell is usually for minor offenses or local drunks who got into a fight, but it was solitary and the police treated them incredibly roughly. I finally understood why all the Russians I spoke to were so incredibly worried when I said I was going to the police station for an immigration card.
I don't know what went wrong for them, but three Chinese people were also waiting with me. Unlike me, they went into the interrogation room one by one to speak with the police, accompanied by occasional loud, scolding shouts from the officers. I don't know what happened, but they definitely didn't seem like victims. Watching them, I realized something: even if Russians—specifically the police—can't speak English, some of them can speak Chinese. It was mostly just stringing words together, but it was fascinating that they could communicate in Chinese. Why on earth can't they speak English? Is it because they could learn Chinese as a fellow socialist state, but couldn't get English education? (Ah, of course, people in their teens and twenties speak English well.)
4 hours in: The older officer currently typing up my precious document is a hunt-and-peck typist. With one hand, no less. Like a master craftsman of word processing, he carefully presses each key one by one. My girlfriend's flight is arriving soon, and this guy is just too slow. And all he has to do is type what he sees, but suddenly he deletes something he didn't like!! I feel like even I, without knowing the Russian keyboard, could type faster than this computer illiterate. What's more annoying is that this guy, who seems to have a high rank, does an incredible amount of busywork in between. Opening the police office door (it's heavily protected by an iron gate), chatting with cops coming in for a break, answering the phone with annoyance, lending cigarettes to guys who ran out, lending a lighter to the same guy right after, answering questions from various guys holding guns, staring blankly at the sky, then staring at the ground. He seems to do literally everything except focus on the keyboard and type.
4 hours and 30 minutes in: The paperwork is finally done. I received the noble printout crafted by the document artisan,
he only wrote five lines
and ran to the immigration office. Sure enough, people didn't know the address I was given this time either. Just as I thought my luck had run out, an Arab youth who spoke English and even knew how to use a map app appeared like a savior and gave me the exact address and directions. Thanks to that handsome guy, I arrived at the immigration office, which was attached to an apartment building. (The immigration office and the apartment are together, so you'd never find it without help.)
The place with numbers on the first floor of the apartment is the immigration office. Wait, isn't the immigration office for foreigners? I wondered who could possibly find it when it's this unrecognizable. I was in a rush, so I just opened a random door, went in, and showed them my documents; they told me to go to door number 2. (I was in too much of a hurry to take pictures, but from the outside, you would never guess it's a government office.) I went to door number 2, showed my documents, and it was Russian again. Shouldn't they speak English at the immigration office? Ah!! This is Russia. If I come to Russia and can't speak Russian, it's my fault. Russia is a place that really delivers a wake-up call to me—someone who lived in an English-centric world, who thought using English made you look educated, who assumed English would naturally work everywhere, and who thought there was a problem if English didn't work. Setting aside my deep enlightenment about how wide the world is and the differences in how people live, they started debating among themselves about how to process me.
5 hours in: After I was supposed to get my documents back, the fastest workers I've seen yet are right in front of me. Of course, they tried explaining in Russian to get me to fill out some forms, gave up, and just started filling everything out themselves.
Yeah, that's the fastest way!!!
Then they took fingerprints of all my fingers on both hands, plus my palms, and I finally received my immigration card.
I finally got it!!!
The fascinating thing is that from start to finish, even though everyone was flustered and looked perplexed like "how do we handle this?", except for one person
the security guard near the hotel
no one ran away, gave up, dumped the responsibility on me, passed the buck, blamed me for losing it, or asked for money to fix it. My biggest fear was that they would act intimidating or demand a bribe, but that wasn't the case at all. Sure, they didn't smile, gave me weird addresses, filled out paperwork slowly, explained everything in Russian, gave up trying to speak English the moment they realized I didn't understand, and pulled the "I'm done, go to that guy now" move quite a few times, but they still got the job done.
If you want to tour Russian government offices and police stations and see how they work, I highly recommend losing your immigration card. However, regardless of how many days you're traveling, you should expect to completely blow 1-2 days. And if you end up in a situation where "nothing good happens when you go to a Russian government office," as my Russian friends worried, I can't help you.
I'm late. I need to get to the airport.
Government Office Tips
- The immigration office is open until 8 PM.
- The process for a lost document is as follows. However, it is extremely difficult if you don't have someone who speaks both Russian and Korean.
- Submit a handwritten statement of loss to the police.
- The police process it and print out an official document.
- Take that document to the immigration office, get fingerprinted, and get it reissued.
- It takes a long time, so never be in a rush.
- They say not having an immigration card can cause major problems when leaving Russia. I don't know why.
- Every Russian I met (except the cop near the hotel and the word processing artisan) tried to help me as quickly as possible if I spoke to them without getting annoyed. Contrary to their image, they are kind "in their own way."
- If it's a bigger problem than this or there's zero progress, definitely remember the words "Embassy of the Republic of Korea." People generally say they aren't great, but they are still a huge help.
Expenses
- Aeroexpress to Domodedovo (airport) round trip + girlfriend's ticket 470R * 3 = 1410R
- Dinner 1062R
Total Expenses 2472R
Total Trip Expenses 525,936 KRW + 24,032 RUB + $53.16