Disclosure: The following story is not representative of our experience in Russia so far. Almost everyone we’ve met has been very helpful — and very accommodating of our inability to speak Russian.
Today was nearly uneventful: Morning rain led us to defer our trip to Lake Baikal till tomorrow, so we spent another day wandering around Irkutsk, visiting its sleepy art museum and hard-to-reach monastery. In the evening, we grabbed dinner at a strangely empty Italian restaurant and headed back for an early evening at the hostel.
We were walking back along Karl Marx Street, Irkutsk’s main commercial drag, when out of nowhere a young security guard chased us down and, grabbing my elbow, motioned that we needed to go with him to a fancy department store nearby. When we refused, he summoned backup, in the form of another guard and an almost too-good-to-be-true chief of security. He was huge and brawny, with a shaved head and more than a few missing teeth. We couldn’t understand what he was yelling at us in Russian or why he was gesticulating with a little leafy stem, but he seemed to think we had done something very wrong.
It's pronounced like Karl Marx, I swear.
Having a grain of common sense between us, Dan and I weren’t leaving the safety of the public sidewalk. After a few more minutes of yelling, one of the guards walked away and reappeared a few minutes later with a man who spoke English. Our new translator explained that the guards had video footage of us picking a stem off of a bush in front of the store, and that this damage could cost the guards a fine of 100,000 rubles ($3,450) (!) We needed to go back to the store to “control” the situation.
The whole thing smelled fishy, especially when they refused to explain what “controlling” the situation would mean. The translator kept encouraging us to go with the guards, saying that they didn’t want money, they didn’t want to punish us, they just wanted us to watch the video. But that made very little sense to us. After around 20 minutes of arguing, in which the amounts of money that were mentioned dropped lower and lower, we decided that Dan should go back to the hostel to get a translator that we knew we could trust.
As soon as Dan rounded the corner onto Lenin Street, the scam began to disintegrate. The chief of security disappeared. The translator said that we didn’t need to go to the store after all, and that if I apologized, they would “handle it.” He translated my effusive non-apology to the first security guard and then they both melted away into the flow of pedestrians.
I intercepted Dan back at the hostel, where we breathed a deep sigh of relief. The whole episode raised more questions than it answered: What would have happened if we went with them? Was the English speaker somehow in on the scam? I was glad that we both kept good heads on our shoulders — if we had followed them back to the store, I doubt that our wallets would have escaped unscathed.
It’s never nice to be the victim of a scam, even an unsuccessful one. Particularly when you are newly arrived in a country, it can cast a pall over all of your other experiences. I’m going to try not to let that happen here — but I’ll be giving a wide berth to any other bushes we may pass by.
I’m posting every day during my journey along the Trans-Mongolian Railway! See previous posts in my Trans-Mongolian Diary or subscribe to my RSS feed to follow along.
Related posts:
Add to your RSS Reader
Subscribe by e-mail
Follow me on Twitter
Flickr photostream
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
1) Don’t split up.
2) Don’t stand there and argue, walk away.
3) If things get at all physical, scream your heads off for a policeman.
Shady people are everywhere and not limited to any one country. Fortunately the vast majority of people are awesome and would do anything for you.
Good luck on the rest of your journey!
Very true! It’s important not to let a bad experience or two overwhelm your entire trip.