Kremlin Calling

Arrived in Moscow this morning for my first-ever trip to Russia. I grew up in the 80s and lived in relative fear of nuclear war, or at least some really healthy bombings and so this is kind of an epic turning point in my travels. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would be visiting here one day, or that I would be staying in an American chain hotel when I did so.

My trip really began with the visa request. I have heard from many of my foreign friends that the US is one of the worst countries when it comes to visas. I wouldn’t know, being American, but what I can tell you is that Russia probably comes in a close second. I had to fill out so much paperwork I thought for a moment I was back in England and dealing with HMRC (the UK tax service, for all of you lucky enough not to have had the pleasure).

Although, on a side note, I think Indonesia was the most amusing so far with regard to visas. I had to pay to get in (about $25 USD) and then I had to pay again (about $20 USD) to get out! Pretty clever plan because if you don’t want to pay then you get stuck in the airport, Tom Hanks The Terminal style. But I digress…

I had to list my travel going back 10 years. I had to provide all sorts of letters and explanations of my visit, and this was WITH an invitation from my company. I had to complete the application twice - once online and once on paper. Seriously. The exact same application. I can’t imagine the headache if I were just a hapless tourist. And it was expensive. Nearly $800 for the privilege to enter the country for less than a week.  

I had to send 2 passport-style photographs with the application. Which meant I had to find a place to get these photos. Times certainly have changed because instead of the photo booth I was used to from the UK, a clerk at CVS used a digital camera to take a picture of me in front of a blank screen and then she just printed and cropped the photos on site. And when I got my passport back with the visa inside? No photos. It actually said “Photograph not required” (I had to get my brother, who speaks Russian, to verify that this was correct as I didn’t want to land and have them turn me away because I didn’t have my mug shot in there). So somewhere in the Russian consulate in New York are two passport-size photographs of me doing something or other.

So, after about a week, I had an expedited visa in hand. I chose to fly Delta because a) I wanted the miles and b) I don’t really trust Aeroflot. I have read they have great safety record, yadda yadda yadda, but I’m still a bit nervous and I thought it best to stick with tried and true.

The flight itself was relatively uneventful save for the boarding process in New York. Delta didn’t think it was necessary to have anyone at the gate who spoke Russian. And so you had your usual New Yorkers running things - heavy on the accent, light on the patience. There was a herd of Russians trying to get on the plane from the moment they opened the door to the jetway and it looked like a stampede was about to take place until a very nice Russian woman who was clearly fluent in English stood on a chair and began dropping some Zone-based boarding knowledge on her comrades. I told the Delta agent that should qualify for immediate upgrade as she just saved them a whole hot mess of time and trouble. Of course, greedy bastards that the airlines are, they didn’t do it. (Despite there being an empty seat up front)

My first impressions of Moscow as we came in to land were that it looked a lot more like America than I thought and that the area around the city was much greener than expected. It looked kind of like Seattle from the air with all the trees. (Compare this to China; coming into Shanghai was like looking down on some post-modern view of an industrial state gone bad. Grey, grey, grey). My second impression of Moscow was that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The airport had about 20 brand-new cubicles for passport control. Nineteen of the twenty were for “Russian citizens only”. I kid you not. So most of the plane had to wait in an enormous queue to visit one rather surly passport official who had a stare that gave me a liquid feeling in my stomach.

My company had arranged a driver to meet me, which was good as the arrivals hall was full of shady men yelling “TAXI TAXI” in my face the minute they clocked I was a foreigner. I like to believe it was less about my confused look and more about the power of freedom and awesomeness which must have been radiating from my being. I never got my driver’s name but I can tell you three things about him: 1) He confuses English and German a lot and seemed to think I’d understand a Russian-German mishmash of conversation; 2) Despite looking like a kindly banker from a 1940s movie (he had on a suit and everything), he drives like a demented crack addict from Rome and 3) He has 5 cats and 1 dog. This last part was the only part of our “conversation” that I could truly understand, thanks to my 2nd grade Russian vocabulary and the fact that we had a cat when I was little who was a Maine Coon and we named her “kooshka” (because she looked like a koosh ball - remember those?!), and this was a play on the Russian word for cat, “koshka”. I remembered the word for dog (“sabacka”) and he also helped by barking a bit while explaining. I cannot make this stuff up people.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings…