In we went and found the right booth to go to. Then, since Russian do not form queues on the basis of a line created by order of arrival, we asked who was last. We waited a while and it was finally our turn.
We crammed ourselves into the small, claustrophobic room and and closed the door behind us. One by one, we went through the tedious process of acquiring travellers' cheques: counting Roubles - double-checking manually, triple-checking by machine; calculating what the sum would equate to in dollars, again with the need to confirm the figures repeatedly; taking our details, copied laboriously from our passports by someone not overly-familiar with the Latin script, thus adding to the already lengthy process; issuing the cheques, which required the copying of serial numbers onto their forms and onto ours.
The process for one person took so long that academics were starting to assign names for this geological period, let alone for the three of us. By the time the second one of us had finished, impatient customers were already hammering on the door. When the third of us was being attend to, it felt like they were trying to break the door down, quite possibly with battering rams. I couldn't help but think of the Frankenstein film when the townsfolk form a lynch mob to hunt down the monster.
Finally it was time to leave. I had a mix of fear at facing the pitchfork-armed throng and the amusement of walking past like I didn't give a shit.
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Elsewhere in this blog: Banking in Russia
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