This would fit maybe in 2019, but Moldova now has many foreigners. Hotel prices went up considerably!
For "Europe's least visited country" try Belorus, Ukraine, Russia, Ossetia or Armenia.
Traveling to Mariupol as a tourist is the real deal in 2024
For "Europe's least visited country" try Belorus, Ukraine, Russia, Ossetia or Armenia.
Traveling to Mariupol as a tourist is the real deal in 2024
edit to add -- not sure Ossetia is technically a country... the Georgians might quibble with you on that one
Never change Scotland.
except you'll be on occupied territory and will be breaking Ukrainian law, you might get a prison sentence if you ever go to Ukraine again
Lots of things in immigration require you to honestly self-report and have no mechanism to validate at the point-of-entry. For instance, many countries without visa requirements will still ask about criminal records in your native country, but have no access to the data to verify if you tell them you've never even had a parking ticket.
But if you get caught later down the line, then they are going to use your lies to make life very hard for you.
What I was mentioning though is that countries will let you have a second passport from a single country if you have issues like this, to avoid showing the stamps in one passport.
Then the obvious question to "where you exactly you have been there and what for" will come out unexpectedly for you and you will start making up a bullshit story on the spot (after being on the road for the last whole day) and spit out enough signals to look into you even more.
At this point you are taken to a room for a talk and asked to show pictures in your phone, hotel confirmations, train tickets, etc, which obviously show you have been where you are not supposed to and you lying as well. If you panic and refuse to show the phone contents, you are likely just barred from entrance on the spot and put on a list. If you do show the phone contents and there isn't anything noteworthy, but your story is not coherent enough (or the opposite: coherent enough to the point you prepared for it), you get at date with a three letter agency who is supposed to not rely on feelings.
The "how do they know" is always a bad idea as long as people need to know and your actions leave extensive digital papertrail.
But legallity, politics and bad taste aside, it just seems a dangerous place to visit. It wasn't long ago that an Ukrainian missile was shot down over Crimea which ended falling down on a beach in Sevastopol and killing 4 people.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Don't. It's impossible to do from the Ukrainian side and illegal from Russia.
But I don't see any point in doing that. If you follow the timeless advice of Egor Letov, and read some North Korean or Soviet books, you would know everything that is going to be said. Why waste time watching someone perform the stupid play?
But I cannot imagine doing that as an American. It kind of makes me wonder if he's messing with me but he hates Russia and Putin and I don't know why he would. I feel like I would be so unsafe. I'm a very "American" looking person and I only know a handful of Russian words. Well, I guess I look more German, blonde/blue eyed.
Maybe just very different apprehensions when it comes to travel. He seems to be willing to go to literally anywhere.
Ironically I always expect an American to start shit with him when I'm out drinking with him so I sometimes deviate conversations away from him having to talk about being Russian at every bar we're at. He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.
They're all sad stories but there's a ballerina who lived in California for decades and was a US citizen (If you were ever Russian, Russia doesn't recognize your new state, you're always Russian) who was arrested last year when visiting I believe a grandma. Her charge was that she donated $25 to a Ukranian refugee fund. She had a few articles last year but not much keeping her in the news. She's going to have a tough time being an immigrant from Russia who donated to Ukraine. I don't think she has a chance of getting out and the women penal colonies like IK-14 are essentially slave factories.
The Ukraine war has taught me a lot about how Russia treats peope, especially women. Field Wives, et al. Now they're releasing female prisoners to Storm Z groups to go to the front line.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/04/world-news/ksenia-karelinas-le...
https://www.rferl.org/a/notorious-russian-women-s-prison-hel...
Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room?
I live near a Russian Orthodox church. People complain about the congregants, but mostly about their parking. A house opposite the church as a Ukrainian flag prominently hung; on the other hand one of the congregants has a sticker of the Ukrainian flag with the don't-tread-on-me rattlesnake. I don't think most Americans care enough to be rude to Russians.
We visited St. Petersburg some years ago, probably 2012. I very much enjoyed the visit. Everyone seemed to be much too preoccupied to give a damn where we came from. The cases of Griner, Gershkovich, and the NCO in Vladivostok do make one wonder about the prospects of American tourists.
There is a simpler explanation: Russian is probably the only Slavic language most Americans know about.
My grandparents and parents and siblings all learned Ukrainian in school during Soviet times. This is in what now would be considered a predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine btw.
Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close.
Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.
For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc).
In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this.
Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days.
But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).
From the other side, my Czech friends told me that Polish sounded to them like something from deep antiquity. Like reading an ancient manuscript where again you get the words but no sane person these days would use them like this.
(edit: I have no idea how it’d feel nowadays, and won’t visit Russia atm either.)
> almost European in ambiance
That does not need to be a good thing, though. :D
Just like I can easily tell if someone is British or Australian (not that they look the same, but easy to discern which is which usually).
An Italian once; "Americans walk confidently in the wrong direction."
To be honest I've watched a ton of Russian YouTube content and on these videos the Russian cities doesn't seem affected. Just forget your visa/mastercard
You've been to the city center. The outskirts are dull even by Russian standards. Because of the soil there, they tend to build high-rise residential buildings spaced by 500m to 1km. Streets run in-between, there are occasional malls and that's it.
Many years ago a friend went to Syria in its brief window of peace, and visited some of the incredibly well preserved Roman sites. I hope they're still OK.
Now I’m imagining a flat with some Russian friends where they take turns throwing darts at pictures of Biden. Or Obama.
I don’t know why you think that Russians or whatever else would make an American unsafe. I mean what would they even care/have against you.
> Ironically I always expect an American to start shit with him when I'm out drinking with him so I sometimes deviate conversations away from him having to talk about being Russian at every bar we're at. He's only been in America a few years so as soon as he speaks the entire bar knows he's Russian.
Well talking about your country of origin is the most natural thing to do in those contexts.
Someone out enjoying their night with friends doesn't want to constantly have to explain that they're from Russia, where in Russia, no not Moscow, 3 hours from Moscow, no I don't like Putin, no I don't support the war, etc etc over and over to random drunks.
I am glad that most (if not all) of the people we encounter aren't rude and assume he supports Putin/war, etc. That's usually what I expect to come out of someones mouth once they find out he's Russian.
Maybe the USA just has a lot more news outlets. We don't have Oblasts or little shanty towns full of drunk war criminals committing rapes and crimes that don't get reported because the Oblast/town has no local news agency and everything they learn on the news is filtered through VK. There is a university on the border of Ukraine (30mins or so in I believe) where they kicked out ALL of the students living there and filled it up with village evacuees and men who are in between going to the front line. They basically took over an entire college and were sexually assaulting/harassing the young students. There is one news article about it off of telegram and it's never been updated, happened a year ago.
Not a single American thinks about Guantanamo Bay in their day to day life that isn't a public defender.
I'm on a LOT of Russian telegram channels since they started the war. Nearly all Russians get their news off of Telegram or vk and it's basically all community sourced news. If the gov doesn't want you to hear about it you won't. A LOT of stuff goes on that you only hear about if you go to that specific telegrams news channel (often for an Oblast/city/town). A LOT of people don't report any news at all because they don't want to get harassed by the government.
Funny comment though. Curious where you're from.
And order a Chicken Kiev when you arrive!