Registering confusion

Kate has a bit of a thing about breaking rules – let's just say that she isn't keen. And if there's a fine involved, well, it turns into something akin to a phobia. So Russia isn't really the place for her.

For the past few days, she has been completely consumed by a piece of archetypally Russian bureaucratic Catch-22-ism. Since 2007, all foreign visitors to Russia have been obliged to register their visas within seven working days of entering the country. If you move around, you have to register again in each place in which you spend seven working days or more. Under normal circumstances, this is a pretty simple process, as it's actually your hotel that's supposed to do the registering, so you just have to pay a small fee and they'll sort things for you. If they fail to register your visa, both you and they are subject to a fine; the hotel also faces losing its licence and you may be banned from re-entering Russia for up to five years.

Unfortunately, what we're doing doesn't count as normal circumstances. Although we'll be in Russia for a few weeks, we're not staying anywhere for more than three days, and the law is distinctly unclear about what that means for us. Unsurprisingly, none of our hotels know what to do with us. So far, the two places in which we've stayed have refused to register us because we haven't been here for seven days and aren't staying with them for seven days – as far as they're concerned, we don't have to register our visas because we haven't fallen into any of the relevant boxes. But pretty soon we'll have been here for more than seven working days without having registered, which is when we fall into a box we don't want to fall into.

Unhelpfully, there's no official website that explains what to do in a situation such as ours. There's no helpline we can call, no email address for us to write to, no FAQ we can consult. There are numerous online discussion threads that offer wildly conflicting advice ('Don't worry about it, no-one ever checks, and if they do, just explain things and you'll be fine'; 'Be afraid, be very afraid'). But if a policeman takes a dislike to us, we could be in pretty big trouble.

The good news is that Kate has convinced one of the hotels we're due to stay in to register us. We'll still have to get through a few limbo days before then, but it we keep our heads down and make sure we're carrying all of the important documents with us (passports, ferry boarding cards, train tickets, hotel booking details – I mean, really!), we should be okay. Fingers crossed...