Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Oh cool story!
What'd you do then?
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Long story, and the first part of it is in the archives somewhere around here about how I got pickpocketed in Mongolia so I won't bother retelling that, but basically I when I rolled into Moscow with about five dollars, I immediately set out to find the Canadian embassy, but it was friday afternoon and the embassy was closed until Monday. So I starting going around to all the hostels in my guidebook, explaining my story and hoping to find a sympathetic ear, but nobody seemed to believe my story. I was briefly considering finding a park to sleep in, but then I ran into an australian fellow who told me about about how he had been walking through a park late at night and got mugged, waking up the next day with a broken arm and several broken ribs (his broken arm just hanging there in a sling as he wasn't willing to let any russian doctor touch him).
So with nowhere else to go, I decided to see if I could bluff my way into a fancy hotel. I chose the Hotel Russya, which was, at the time, the world's largest hotel. I walked up to the front desk, showed them my passport, asked for a room for a week, and when asked about payment, said I'd pay on my credit card when I left. They gave me some keys, and I went to my room and immediately ordered a whole lot of room service, as I had not had much to eat over my six days on the train, then called my parents. With no way for them to wire me any money until Monday, I was stuck trying to find anything remotely cheap to do over the weekend. Which was pretty much nothing, so I wandered around, looking at the architecture and riding the metro (and fending off the extremely agressive door-to-door prostitutes who work the hotel. I was terrified that someone would find out that I was pennyless before I got my wire transfer, but as long as I was running up my bill on phonecalls to north america and lots of room service, nobody asked any questions.