I'm a simple emigrant and I went home

Since moving, I’ve tried to go home every six months, but that turned out to be possible only once or twice. You know why: a whole string of “once-in-a-lifetime” apocalypses happened in my prime years. So, my next planned trip in April 2022 fell through. The hope that the situation would improve also collapsed. Therefore I decided there was no point in waiting any longer and simply go home. First, I needed to figure out how I could even get into Russia. At that moment there were three main routes: by plane with a connection in Turkey, by bus through Estonia, or by bus through Finland. My monitoring led me to conclude that I should go through Estonia. The whole journey consisted of four parts: first a flight to Riga, a little over two hours and €84, then a bus to Estonia, 4.5 hours and €14, then a bus to Saint Petersburg, 8 hours and €45, and finally by plane to Tyumen, three hours and about €65 — hello to the cheerful ruble exchange rate. The main cherry on top of the trip is the double land border. The bus to Saint Petersburg was overnight, and among the 8 hours, three hours, right in the middle, were allocated to crossing these two borders. Honestly, I panicked pretty badly, because, as usual, people in chats only tend to escalate things, since they write about negative experiences far more often than about positive ones. I had some cash euros that you could have, or perhaps not; and I also had my own clothes that I ordered the day before and hadn’t removed the price tags — the border guards’ reaction to this is unpredictable; my neighbor had two new pairs of sneakers and a half-empty suitcase, so we sat there stressing together. At the Estonian border, border guards board the bus and take all passports. I tried not to stand out as much as I could, but I got tangled in my valid passports and while I was sorting out which tickets I bought, I thought, that’s it, they’ll imprison me right away (spoiler: they didn’t). In general, you just wait an hour and a half, then the border guard returns and either points at people and asks you to do something, or simply returns the passport. In our bus there were some problems only with one woman, but she instantly started to protest and justify herself and, in the end, she was let through as well. And at the Russian border no one is going to do anything for you, so please, exit the bus with all your belongings and go through the checkpoint with the metal detector. But it’s good that there too everything went smoothly, and the stress ended, though a wild fatigue hit me for the whole journey. I couldn’t rest for another day yet, but that’s another story. And what interesting things have happened to you? #russia