Tuesday Feb.13th and Wednesday Feb.14th

Well, as the last post stated, we flew to Frankfurt and hung out for about two hours. The flight from Vancouver had some electrical issues about 2/3 of the way through the movie Scoop and the screens retracted back into the ceiling. Being that I was curious to see who done it, I listened to the remaining portion of the movie. The electrical issues continued as the cabin lights would just come on and off at random. Fortunately for us, we remained in the dark. The flight attendants were going around and placing dark stickers on the lenses so that the passengers could sleep. It was a long flight of about 11 hours. We flew over Greenland and the outside ambient temperature showed as low as -95 Deg C on the screen. There were two full meals and 1 and 2/3 full movies. I indulged in some free gin and tonic and drank countless glasses of water in anticipation of not having a lot of good water in Moscow.

Because of the time change and flight duration, we couldn’t help but lose a whole day off the calendar. We left Frankfurt at about 3pm Frankfurt time and the flight to Moscow was only 2-1/2 hours. We did though lose a couple more hours in time change. The customs in Moscow was what we were geared up to be cavity searched, but only PA set off the “coloured guy” flags and was made to x-ray his bags. My tool bag was on his cart as we didn’t discriminate luggage at the carousel and loaded it all on two carts.

We were met by Roman, our driver, and he quickly guided us through the maze of cabbies and out into the parking lot where his van waited. We piled in and watched him pilot us through the hellish Moscow traffic. We were traveling 5 km/h and needed to go 15km. Do the math on that. We were very short on any Russian and he was only in possession of 16 English words, so we had to sign/gesture/communicate for him to phone our contact people and get us to the train. PA and I both picked up a Russian Lonely Planet book to help us translate. Roman laughed as I said “hold me” in Russian. Those books have absolutely every phrase you could imagine. After a short discussion about hockey (just naming Russian players and nodding) we finally got onto the main street and were able to change to a gear higher than first in the van. As we passed the landmarks in Moscow, Roman would say “Gorbachev..office” or “military...musee: and we would just gawk at the bright lights and immense cultural differences. Finally we pulled up to a gate in a commercial area and we pulled through and parked. This was the office building of the contact people responsible for our travel. Partly responsible anyways. We had coffee and cookies and waited for our English speaking contact person to set us up with our train tickets and feed us.

Natalia arrived at 9:00pm and was a very cheeky but polite escort for us as she took us to a local eating establishment and purchased for us miscellaneous food items for us to “try”. She smiled at everything that was before us and had us wondering how much of the food were cow testicles or something. Nonetheless, the food was good and we had to hurry to catch our train. We arrived back at the office where we had 10 minutes to check e-mail and then off again with Roman to the train station. Thankfully Roman led us to the train and took us right to our car. Only my name was in English on the ticket and good god if I would have been able to navigate to the train by myself in the dark. We said farewell to our new friend and hauled all of our stuff into our cabin. Two men with 7 bags made for tight quarters. We were met by the train mom and she was speaking in Russian to us. We were having trouble understanding what she was talking about, so we assumed passport and found out after that she was offering bedding for us. Exhausted from traveling, we pretty much layed down and tried to sleep. The octagonal? wheels prevented me from sleeping much. Ultimately I slept less than 2 hours in 2 days.