Imagine this situation - you have a vitally important letter to send from Hungary to Ukraine, and it has to get there the next day. How do you do it? Forget about normal post or registered post, even express mail can take two weeks. Forget courier services too; they're safer, but can still take more than a week, and some won't deliver to private addresses in Ukraine.
So, you do what Ukrainians and Russians have been doing for years - use the unofficial "railway post", as I did this evening. I had to send UK Visa original invitation letters to our team leader in Ukraine, so that she could come to twoUK conferences later this year.
1. Go to Keleti Station in Budapest, and find the platform where the Tisza Express to Kiev and Moscow is waiting.
2. Find one of the two Ukrainian sleeping-cars and explain to the attendant that you want to send a letter to Kiev. (It helps a lot if you speak Russian.) She invites you into a compartment, because this is not exactly legal according to the Hungarian police.
3. Show her the that the letter has no money in it (because that is totally illegal in Ukraine), and show her the name of the recipient who will meet the train in Kiev.
4. She gives her own name (for identification purposes) and happily accepts a $10 note.
5. Outside, send a text message to Ukraine with the name, the coach number, and the arrival time (journey time is 24 hours).
6. The deal is done, and the letter will definitely arrive safely. If ever a letter didn't get through, nobody would trust the system any more and the attendants would lose a valuable source of income.
Life in this business is never dull! Walking around cold Keleti Station in my thick leather jacket and handing packages to strangers on long-distance eastbound trains has an almost romantic air of Central European espionage about it. I quite enjoy it really. By the way, I got the photo from the web, but the two men playing chess were still there this evening!
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