August 27, 2013

Useful Resources for Tourists Visiting Russia


Useful Resources for Tourists Visiting Russia

Real Russia

This is a list of frequently asked questions for tourists. Generally it is about how to obtain your visa, what you do with it and what you can do in Russia. This guide is the technical side of obtaining your visa, and doesn’t include many lifestyle tips!

Just Go Russia

This one is a little short and is only lifestyle tips. They’re great if you’re worried about how to behave in Russia, but it’s not too technical about the actual process of getting there.

A Complete Guide to Applying for a Russian Visa

This is a comprehensive and fairly definitive guide on how to apply for a Russian visa. Whether it’s tourism, business or charity work, this tells you everything you need to know to make sure your visa is sorted, so that your trip may come off with at least one less hitch.

Russian Invitation

This short guide is only about the letter of recommendation process when obtaining your visa. It can be the most confusing and difficult part of the process to understand, so this guide really helps. It covers the possibilities, the reason to have one and how to get yours.

North European Cruises

This nifty travel guide will help those who have just arrived in Russia, especially those in St Petersburg. It’s a lifestyle guide about how to behave and function and includes some links at the bottom which will take you to further guides for Russian tourists. It doesn’t cover the technicalities of visas, but does help you if you are confused about practical life in Russia.

Way to Russia

This site is great. It is an inclusive guide that covers mostly everything. It has lifestyle tips, advice and guides to get your visa, what you should do in Russia, how you should behave. It also has a link to a Facebook group that is a kind of forum where tourists can contact each other.

Go to Russia

This guide is a brief look at the technicalities of getting to Russia. It covers questions about visas but doesn’t help too much when you get there. Though it is helpful and even covers questions for people taking a cruise.

Russian Tour Guide

This independent tour guide site is great for tours. But their blog is the best; it features guides, shows you what to do and is a great way to learn about your trip before you even get there

Russian Dos and Don’ts

A good guide of do’s and don’ts while traveling. Partly it is about how to combat American stereotypes and partly is it a great resource detailing what it is like to be Russian and to live in Russia. An authentic guide for those who wish to take the road less travelled.

Frommers – How to Behave

This is a dense guide about how to behave in Russia. It includes money and travel advice, food and medical attention and of course how to get your visa and what it does.

Ask Me I’m Local

A scheme in which volunteers will find English speakers and help them around Moscow. It can help people feel more accustomed to the city and not nervous or afraid of what it has to offer. It combats a lack of information available for English-speaking tourists.

Ten Things to Never Say or Do in Russia

This is just a quick guide of how to behave in Russia. It offers interesting insights on differences in manners and expectations. Definitely one for a young person staying with a host family!

Women in Russia

This one is unique. It is written by a Russian bride who moved to the West ten years ago.  It is a strict guide about how to behave, and also includes some tips of where to travel.

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Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
Murder and the Muse

Murder and the Muse

KGB Chief Andropov has tapped Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso’s wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead.
Fearful Majesty

Fearful Majesty

This acclaimed biography of one of Russia’s most important and tyrannical rulers is not only a rich, readable biography, it is also surprisingly timely, revealing how many of the issues Russia faces today have their roots in Ivan’s reign.
The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.
A Taste of Russia

A Taste of Russia

The definitive modern cookbook on Russian cuisine has been totally updated and redesigned in a 30th Anniversary Edition. Layering superbly researched recipes with informative essays on the dishes' rich historical and cultural context, A Taste of Russia includes over 200 recipes on everything from borshch to blini, from Salmon Coulibiac to Beef Stew with Rum, from Marinated Mushrooms to Walnut-honey Filled Pies. A Taste of Russia shows off the best that Russian cooking has to offer. Full of great quotes from Russian literature about Russian food and designed in a convenient wide format that stays open during use.
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
The Little Golden Calf

The Little Golden Calf

Our edition of The Little Golden Calf, one of the greatest Russian satires ever, is the first new translation of this classic novel in nearly fifty years. It is also the first unabridged, uncensored English translation ever, and is 100% true to the original 1931 serial publication in the Russian journal 30 Dnei. Anne O. Fisher’s translation is copiously annotated, and includes an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, the daughter of one of the book’s two co-authors.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
A Taste of Chekhov

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 

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