Banking and Training

I am really shocked at the condition of banking in former USSR.  It's crazy the things you take for granted.

We've been on this side of the Atlantic now for a month and a week.  We have been able to use a Visa card a total of three times.  Once at OBI, the big Home Depot equivalent, once at Media-Mart, a big electronics superstore (and actually, I think many of the stores at the big mall in Moscow will take a Visa card), and then to buy our one-way train tickets to the Ukraine.

The whole time we were in Ukraine we were unable to use our Visa card anywhere.  That led to a shocking amount of scouring the Crimean Peninsula for an ATM that actually had money in it.  Crazy.  Funnily, the ticket-selling window at Kazantip had the sticker for Visa, Mastercard, etc, but when we asked if we could pay with our card, the woman looked at us like we were crazy.  This prompted a search for an ATM with money in it, since the tickets for the two of us were about $400.

The lack of a functional banking system, and public trust in general, was probably most egregiously a pain when we wanted to come back from the Ukraine.  To do so, we had to actually go to the train station, and then, since there was no information posted, we had to stand in a long line to talk to one of two cashiers at this busy station to find out when the trains were running to Moscow, which classes, which were available, etc.  We found that they did have two tickets on the train in the class we wanted, but we were a few hundred grivnas short (we had 1900 on hand, needed 2200).  Another ATM-finding trek ensued, followed by another long wait in line to actually buy the tickets.

There were posters all over for a company/service that says they will go to the train station and buy your ticket to Moscow for you, but they are widely regarded as scams.  There is no trust in any business - even if they were to deliver a ticket to you, you would not really trust it.  I feel like it's the polar opposite of the US airlines where you can buy your ticket from your smartphone, have it just show a barcode through the app, which the agent scans.

But I think that's a pretty high-level complaint, I spent probably 30% of the trip without running water...

A side note to this, the people in these all-cash societies generally hate when you don't have exact change for things.  Makes it tough when the ATM dispenses random bills, too.  Sometimes it's a 200 grivna note that comes out (generally despised by shopkeepers everywhere, rougly $25), sometimes it's a 50 grivna note (about $6).  This did, however, facilitate my first ever owning of a whole bank-wrapped bundle of bills after we went into one bank one time that was willing to trade our 200 grivna notes for a stack of 10's.