They give Russian women yellow flowers, try to haggle in stores, plan to drive overnight from Moscow to Siberia, and do many other amazing things. And then they remember it with pleasure. Foreigners share stories about these and other incidents that happened to them in the Russian expanses, and the My Planet channel tells. This channel you don wantt to mute. Good articles, whole news and #tourist bear!
Lost in translation
Cases, endings, hissing sounds, hard and soft signs, many exceptions to the rules – there are enough complexities in the Russian language to confound those who do not speak it from birth. For a guest from Japan, our diminutive suffixes became such a pitfall: for example, in a restaurant, instead of a bill, he first asked for a “brush” or “counter”, invariably causing laughter from those around him. A traveler from Nigeria was looking for hair and body creams in a cosmetics store, and instead bought shampoo and shower gel, focusing only on the inscriptions “hair” and “body” and not reading other incomprehensible words.
Inconceivable distances
It can be difficult for residents of not so large countries to believe that Russia cannot be traveled around in a week, so you have to change plans literally on the go. A family of great admirers of Russian literature from New Zealand expected to fly to Moscow, get by car to the Tula region, visit Yasnaya Polyana, and in the evening go to Omsk (where Dostoevsky was exiled) to be there the next morning. And only on the spot did the tourists realize that they weren’t going anywhere in time: firstly, almost all the signs were in Cyrillic, and secondly, in a day they could not see even half of what they were going to. It was decided to postpone the trip to Yasnaya Polyana, and it took two days to get to Omsk by train from Moscow to Vladivostok instead of the planned two hours. //fs.tonkosti.ru/sized/f550x700/ds/9v/ds9vuwpl8g008cckwc0sk4o8c.jpg” media=”(max-width: 549px)”> Tourists who travel a lot in Asia are used to the fact that bargaining is appropriate everywhere and everywhere – otherwise the seller may even be offended. They are trying to transfer this practice to Russia – for example, they are traded in stores, faced with misunderstanding. A blogger from Croatia tried to get a discount by buying 15 shirts with a portrait of Putin as a gift to friends. The imperturbable salesman pretended not to have heard the question. But the trip to the Izmailovsky market turned out to be more successful: saying that she came from a very poor country, the girl persuaded the seller to give her a scarf for 350 RUB instead of 500. It is very easy for a foreigner to make a mistake in this difficult matter, because, perhaps, only in Russia there are so many “flower rules”: it is not customary to give yellow flowers (heralds of you know what), to give an even number of them (God forbid), and the dislike of Russian women for carnations is completely hard to explain rationally (actually not hard: “Am I as old as a veteran?!”). The author of the My Big Fat Russian Adventure blog honestly tried to remember these rules, but she still broke one thing – she brought 5 yellow gerberas as a gift to her grandmother. It turned out that this color is only suitable for a funeral or a last date. But the Russian lady was left without flowers at all – since she told her foreign husband that giving two roses is a bad omen. Fearing to confuse something again, he decided to completely abandon the purchase of bouquets. the sale of alcohol after 23:00 comes as a surprise to many foreign tourists, as well as fines for drinking strong drinks in public places. All this goes against the popular stereotype that Russians love alcohol. A German traveler arrived in St. Petersburg for the Scarlet Sails festival and was very surprised when a policeman approached him, noticing a bottle of beer in his hands. I had to explain: in Germany they drink beer everywhere and at any time, so it never occurred to him that in Russia it was impossible to do this. However, it did not come to a fine – the guest received only a warning. 
Trade and discounts
Flower etiquette
What else to read?
Prohibition
