A resident of Latvia, Anna, recently crossed the border between Latvia and Russia at the "Terekhovo" point. Everything there is by prior appointment. However, this is of little use.
– Our car has French license plates, my son has dual citizenship, French and Russian. Reservation at 16:00. We arrived at 15:20 – well, we couldn't make it in 2 hours as requested during the booking. First, we were directed to parking, invited in 10 minutes via SMS, passed the first post, and waited.
We passed the Latvian part in an hour. They opened all the doors, the hood of the car, didn’t take out the belongings, and did a quick visual inspection. They asked how many euros I was carrying. I replied, "I have 5 left in my wallet," "...thousand?" – joked the customs officer. At passport control, they asked if I was carrying anything new (computer, phone), I said everything was used for personal use.
They asked again if I knew about the ban on bringing euros, I replied, "I know, I have 5 euros, and it seems that some small amount is not prohibited by law." She replied, "Good that you know – yes, up to 30 euros is allowed." The staff were polite, pleasant, spoke Russian, although I initially asked in English which language was better to communicate. We left the barrier at 16:30, with six cars in front of us. We stood there for 7 hours. You can go to the toilet on the Russian side, leaving your passport in the booth before the second barrier. We entered the Russian side at 00:30 (it was 23:30, but we added an hour for Russian time).
We got in line for customs. There are two lanes, with two cars in front of us at the traffic light and three cars in the customs inspection area.
7:30 (Russia time) – the car in front of us went for an X-ray. We are second. We filled out the declaration, waiting for the car in front of us to finish, and no one is dealing with us.
9:00 – shift change. That is, from 00:30 to 9, they let 5 cars pass in front of us.
9:30 – document check, take out bags, inspect the car, take bags for X-ray.
10:30 – sent the car for X-ray.
11:30 – the customs process was completed, meaning we spent a total of 19 hours at the border.
"I would like to summarize somehow, but here you can only cry," Anna concludes, "on the Russian side, everything was polite too, but very, very slow. I suspect it’s because of the X-ray for all cars and belongings, and they have only one scanner, so it takes 2-3 hours per car."
