Went to a hotel lobby bar once and asked guys sitting to the left and to the right of me where are they from. Turns out both were Scots. Asked them what do they think about Scottish independence. One thing led to another and soon enough they started fist-fighting each other.
Armenian cognac is great.
I should remind you that the Scottish character can be summed up by the simple observation that Scotland is the only country whose national dress includes a knife in the sock.
How would they ever know if you won't outright tell them yourself (like being a famous person an posting your itinerary on the instagram)? They'll see you've been to Russia, if you use the same passport for both visas, which may be frowned upon right now, but not illegal. But which Russian cities you've been to (and de-facto Mariupol is just that right now) — who the hell knows?
That's pretty easy: you cross the border, the border guard sees recent stamp showing you traveled to r---ia and you don't fit the profile of someone having a family there, which trip the alarm to look into you slightly more than usual (in normal days the only thing border guards do is check that passport is not forged).
Then the obvious question to "where you exactly you have been there and what for" will come out unexpectedly for you and you will start making up a bullshit story on the spot (after being on the road for the last whole day) and spit out enough signals to look into you even more.
At this point you are taken to a room for a talk and asked to show pictures in your phone, hotel confirmations, train tickets, etc, which obviously show you have been where you are not supposed to and you lying as well. If you panic and refuse to show the phone contents, you are likely just barred from entrance on the spot and put on a list. If you do show the phone contents and there isn't anything noteworthy, but your story is not coherent enough (or the opposite: coherent enough to the point you prepared for it), you get at date with a three letter agency who is supposed to not rely on feelings.
The "how do they know" is always a bad idea as long as people need to know and your actions leave extensive digital papertrail.
That's ridiculously stretched. Russia is huge. Plenty of choice of "where you've been to". And you absolutely don't have to answer anything about where you've been to in Russia, because it's actually not their fucking business. Worst they can do is not let you into Ukraine. Surely, theoretically they can illegally arrest you, and torture you, and whatever, but doing that to a USA citizen (or whoever you are) on a basis of slight suspicion you could've been in Crimea or some other territory they consider theirs inside of Russia, well, that's risking way more than you do.
Plenty of people have two passports for this reason.
Lots of things in immigration require you to honestly self-report and have no mechanism to validate at the point-of-entry. For instance, many countries without visa requirements will still ask about criminal records in your native country, but have no access to the data to verify if you tell them you've never even had a parking ticket.
But if you get caught later down the line, then they are going to use your lies to make life very hard for you.
Using two passports is not always the solution. As a dual citizen of two countries, I also have two passports. A couple of years ago I travelled to Malta with the passport from the country I currently live in. One week later I flew over to Israel, where I used the passport of my birth country. I was extensively interrogated at the border, because apparently the system flagged me to the border officer as there was no record of me entering Malta with the passport I attempted to leave the country with.
Interesting. But, TBH, it seems pretty obvious in the hindsight: it's a huge red flag that the travel history in the same passport is not self-consistent (as a result of using different passports for entering and leaving the same country).
I always wondered if this would get flagged somehow. I've never tried it myself, but I've thought about doing it.
What I was mentioning though is that countries will let you have a second passport from a single country if you have issues like this, to avoid showing the stamps in one passport.
Just to clarify, a prison sentence doesn't actually mean you'd be incarcerated, Russia for example routinely sentences foreign nationals to prison without the means to getting them arrested
Is there really any chance they are going to hand out prison sentences to foreigners who have visited as a tourist?
But legallity, politics and bad taste aside, it just seems a dangerous place to visit. It wasn't long ago that an Ukrainian missile was shot down over Crimea which ended falling down on a beach in Sevastopol and killing 4 people.
You get similar treatment with an Israeli stamp in your passport if you go to many Muslim countries, not that they will actually stamp your passport anymore. Cuba and DPRK will also avoid stamping your passport for similar reasons with respect to American sanctions (no idea bout Iran).
Mariupol is now de-facto Russian territory (it is administered/occupied by Russians) and you would need to either go from Russian side or cross the frontline.
On the contrary, if you pretend to be an idiot, and ask some Russian government-affiliated NGO “helping Donbass” if you can have a look yourself to be “free from Western propaganda”, I am sure they can pretend to get some positive publicity that way, and add you to this or that group of journalists and government officials who are shown Potemkin reconstruction (on a guided tour in presence of totally not plainclothes agents).
But I don't see any point in doing that. If you follow the timeless advice of Egor Letov, and read some North Korean or Soviet books, you would know everything that is going to be said. Why waste time watching someone perform the stupid play?
I have a Russian friend who is adamant that I would really enjoy and have a great time in Russia. IIRC he tells me to go to St Pete more than Moscow.
But I cannot imagine doing that as an American. It kind of makes me wonder if he's messing with me but he hates Russia and Putin and I don't know why he would. I feel like I would be so unsafe. I'm a very "American" looking person and I only know a handful of Russian words. Well, I guess I look more German, blonde/blue eyed.
Maybe just very different apprehensions when it comes to travel. He seems to be willing to go to literally anywhere.
Ironically I always expect an American to start shit with him when I'm out drinking with him so I sometimes deviate conversations away from him having to talk about being Russian at every bar we're at. He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.
If you go to russia there is a chance of you being arrested on made-up charge just to be used as exchange fund for russian spies or arm dealers arrested in the west. Look up Paul Whelan, Brittney Griner, Michael Calvey, Trevor Reed, and most recently Travis Leake.
Oh yeah I know all about our people over there. Not a chance I'd go post 2014 unless a revolution happens.
They're all sad stories but there's a ballerina who lived in California for decades and was a US citizen (If you were ever Russian, Russia doesn't recognize your new state, you're always Russian) who was arrested last year when visiting I believe a grandma. Her charge was that she donated $25 to a Ukranian refugee fund. She had a few articles last year but not much keeping her in the news. She's going to have a tough time being an immigrant from Russia who donated to Ukraine. I don't think she has a chance of getting out and the women penal colonies like IK-14 are essentially slave factories.
The Ukraine war has taught me a lot about how Russia treats peope, especially women. Field Wives, et al. Now they're releasing female prisoners to Storm Z groups to go to the front line.
I imagine your friend is genuine. During undergrad/before 2014 I attended a summer school (https://www.jass.school) in St. Peterburg. I found the city to be welcoming, almost European in ambiance, with friendly university students. It never felt too foreign or unsafe. In my experience, St. Peterburg is as distinct from how I imagine Moscow as San Francisco is from Dallas, Texas.
(edit: I have no idea how it’d feel nowadays, and won’t visit Russia atm either.)
I'd skip Russia and Ukraine right now for obvious reasons. But I have a friend who managed to visit St. Peterburg before the current war and was quite impressed.
> He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.
Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room?
I live near a Russian Orthodox church. People complain about the congregants, but mostly about their parking. A house opposite the church as a Ukrainian flag prominently hung; on the other hand one of the congregants has a sticker of the Ukrainian flag with the don't-tread-on-me rattlesnake. I don't think most Americans care enough to be rude to Russians.
We visited St. Petersburg some years ago, probably 2012. I very much enjoyed the visit. Everyone seemed to be much too preoccupied to give a damn where we came from. The cases of Griner, Gershkovich, and the NCO in Vladivostok do make one wonder about the prospects of American tourists.
Unfortunately it's just due to the number of people. It's unlikely a random person could tell a difference between Polish and Russian, much less Ukrainian and Russian.
I doubt many Russians can tell the difference between Ukrainian and Polish either. I unironically think that some of them convinced themselves they were fighting Polish mercenaries just because they heard western Ukrainian accents.
Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close.
Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.
Nifty diagrams, but they should be taken with a huge grain of salt of course.
For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc).
In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this.
Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days.
But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).
As a Pole I have a similar reaction to Czech and Slovak. Except it feels less like a strange accent (because we don’t have these as much) and more like baby talk. We get the words, just how they’re used feels unusual, and often funny.
From the other side, my Czech friends told me that Polish sounded to them like something from deep antiquity. Like reading an ancient manuscript where again you get the words but no sane person these days would use them like this.
Yup - Polish is in a different family (Western Slavic), with lots of unknown words and a different phoneme density that immediately lights up as "foreign".
Not a Ukrainian but I know a good few. The language is taught at schools so you if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it. Whether you choose to use it is a different matter. And data would suggest that the usage is on the rise.
I've been in Ukraine last year and one thing I noticed that while people speak in Russian or in a dialect in private, they instantly switch to Ukrainian in public, like when ordering an ice cream from the street stall. They then switch back among them. It's fascinating how things changed in a few years.
> if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it
My grandparents and parents and siblings all learned Ukrainian in school during Soviet times. This is in what now would be considered a predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine btw.
I'm Norwegian. For my first few years living in the UK people regularly asked if I was Polish when they heard my accent. It seems a lot of people just try to map an accent to one of a very few stereotypes whether or not it fits, and if it doesn't they assume [nationality they've recently read about]. It changed to Romanian - which notably sounds nothing like Polish - after the papers moved on to worrying about Romanian immigrants.
They won't know you're American until you open your mouth. There is such a wide variety of phenotypes in SPB that people will just assume you are a Russian. Russians these days mostly have friendly excited reactions to foreigners speaking English in public.
I'm OP you're replying to. I've lived all over Europe, mainly Germany. You can absolutely tell Americans from other crowds by clothes/style and mannerisms.
Just like I can easily tell if someone is British or Australian (not that they look the same, but easy to discern which is which usually).
An Italian once; "Americans walk confidently in the wrong direction."
It's a shame. I'd love to visit St. Petersburg, but the window of history where I could do that in relative ease and safety is closed.
Many years ago a friend went to Syria in its brief window of peace, and visited some of the incredibly well preserved Roman sites. I hope they're still OK.
St Petersburg is beautiful and quite lovely. Or well, I don't know now, but it was before the war.
To be honest I've watched a ton of Russian YouTube content and on these videos the Russian cities doesn't seem affected. Just forget your visa/mastercard
You've been to the city center. The outskirts are dull even by Russian standards. Because of the soil there, they tend to build high-rise residential buildings spaced by 500m to 1km. Streets run in-between, there are occasional malls and that's it.
Russia is a lot like west if you stick to the big cities. Sometimes it's "more western than the west", some people just eat in fast-food chains. Well, at least when I was there before the war.
> But I cannot imagine doing that as an American. It kind of makes me wonder if he's messing with me but he hates Russia and Putin and I don't know why he would. I feel like I would be so unsafe. I'm a very "American" looking person and I only know a handful of Russian words. Well, I guess I look more German, blonde/blue eyed.
Now I’m imagining a flat with some Russian friends where they take turns throwing darts at pictures of Biden. Or Obama.
I don’t know why you think that Russians or whatever else would make an American unsafe. I mean what would they even care/have against you.
> Ironically I always expect an American to start shit with him when I'm out drinking with him so I sometimes deviate conversations away from him having to talk about being Russian at every bar we're at. He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.
Well talking about your country of origin is the most natural thing to do in those contexts.
> Well talking about your country of origin is the most natural thing to do in those contexts.
Someone out enjoying their night with friends doesn't want to constantly have to explain that they're from Russia, where in Russia, no not Moscow, 3 hours from Moscow, no I don't like Putin, no I don't support the war, etc etc over and over to random drunks.
I am glad that most (if not all) of the people we encounter aren't rude and assume he supports Putin/war, etc. That's usually what I expect to come out of someones mouth once they find out he's Russian.
It's funny but personally I'd feel less safe traveling to the USA. The chance of finding myself in the midst of a mass shooting terrifies me. Also being robbed, being involved in a road rage accident. If I was black I'd add to that the possibility of being subjected to police abuse. Without considering the chance I'm for some reason snatched and imprisoned in Guantanamo for the rest of my life without any legal process.
Yeah it's like Mad Max over here. I'm sure Russia doesn't have tons of road rage (wait, didn't the dashcam trend start there?), may have less guns but rape and domestic violence is absolutely insane (and dv is legal now), and Russia absolutely treats black people with respect (oh wait now the battlefield is full of dead minority conscripts hmm).
Maybe the USA just has a lot more news outlets. We don't have Oblasts or little shanty towns full of drunk war criminals committing rapes and crimes that don't get reported because the Oblast/town has no local news agency and everything they learn on the news is filtered through VK. There is a university on the border of Ukraine (30mins or so in I believe) where they kicked out ALL of the students living there and filled it up with village evacuees and men who are in between going to the front line. They basically took over an entire college and were sexually assaulting/harassing the young students. There is one news article about it off of telegram and it's never been updated, happened a year ago.
Not a single American thinks about Guantanamo Bay in their day to day life that isn't a public defender.
I'm on a LOT of Russian telegram channels since they started the war. Nearly all Russians get their news off of Telegram or vk and it's basically all community sourced news. If the gov doesn't want you to hear about it you won't. A LOT of stuff goes on that you only hear about if you go to that specific telegrams news channel (often for an Oblast/city/town). A LOT of people don't report any news at all because they don't want to get harassed by the government.
For "Europe's least visited country" try Belorus, Ukraine, Russia, Ossetia or Armenia.
Traveling to Mariupol as a tourist is the real deal in 2024