I'm a simple emigrant and I went home

Since moving, I have tried to go home every six months, but that happened only once or twice. You know why yourself: a whole series of “once-in-a-lifetime” apocalypses fell on my best years. So my next planned trip in April 2022 fell through. My hopes that the situation would improve also collapsed. Therefore I decided not to wait anymore and simply go home. First I needed to figure out how I could even get into Russia at all. At that time there were three main routes: by plane with a layover in Turkey, by bus through Estonia, or by bus through Finland. My monitoring led me to the conclusion 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 St. Petersburg, 8 hours and €45, and finally a flight to Tyumen, which took three hours and about €65 — hello to the ruble’s cheerful rate. The main cherry of the trip was the double land border. The bus to Petersburg was overnight, and among 8 hours, three hours, exactly in the middle, were allocated for crossing these two borders. Honestly, I freaked out big time, because as usual people in chats only hype things up, since they write about negative experiences far more often than about positive ones. I had some euros in cash, which you can have and can’t still, and I also had my own clothes I ordered the day before and hadn’t torn off the tags — the border guards’ reaction to that is also unpredictable; my neighbor had two new pairs of sneakers and a half-empty suitcase, so we sat there stressed together. At the Estonian border, border guards board the bus and take all passports. I tried as hard as I could not to stand out, 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 arrest me right away (spoiler: they didn’t). In short, 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 problems only with one woman, but she immediately started to protest and try to prove something, 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 pass 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 from the whole journey overwhelmed me. I didn’t manage to rest for another day, but that’s another story. And what interesting things happened to you? #russia