Heading to Mother Russia

Heading to Mother Russia

Moscow, Russia, Asia

Today was an incredibly long day. I tried to go to sleep around 12:30am but never fell asleep. I just laid there in my bed, annoyed for two hours. So I finally got up at 2:15am, got my stuff together and headed out at 2:30am. I got the train to the airport at 2:56am, which arrived at Terminal 1 at 3:19am. It turns out that Terminal 1 isn’t even open anymore, so I had to get off the train, and wait 26 minutes for a bus to come to get me to Terminal 2. After all that, I ended up getting to the airport at 4am, which was perfect timing to check in for my 6:05am flight.

When I went through security to get to the gate, I was behind a group of gypsies that were supposed to be on my same flight to Moscow. I’ve seen a lot of gypsies in different cities, but I have never seen them fly anywhere. It was a bizarre situation. There was an older woman, who I’m guessing was a grandmother, and five kids, who were aged from about 6 to 15. They didn’t want to pay to check any bags, so they literally wore all of their clothes instead of having bags. This made for a pretty ridiculous show at security when they all had to take off almost all of their clothes to get down to just one layer. They had a Pepsi bottle full of water and they went as far as to empty the water out into a trash bin and take the plastic bottle with them. I’ve never seen anything like it.

When we finally got through security and then got to the gate, I never saw the gypsies again. I’m not sure what happened to them, but I know they never got on my flight. They smelled pretty bad at the security line, so I wonder if one of the staff noticed and decided they were not clean enough to fly. What a strange situation.

The flight was alright, nothing special. It was just over two hours to get to Moscow and I was in and out of sleep for most of the flight. I was a little concerned about clearing immigration because of everything that’s going on with Russia and the Ukraine. It turned out to be just like Israel though. I had expected a bunch of questions, but I didn’t get asked one. The guy looked at my passport, stamped it, and I walked right through. My bag came through without a problem, and my next task was to find the train into the city.

This was when I realized that travelling in Russia is going to be much more difficult than anywhere else in Europe. There was not one sign in English. Everything was in Russian, and not one English subtitle. After about 15 minutes of walking around, I stumbled upon the AeroExpress train to the city. I had to wait 45 minutes before the train left, and then it was a 40 minute ride to the center of Moscow. I then found the metro station and had to take two metros to get to the Bolshoi Theatre which is near my hotel.

I came out of the metro station to find that there was some sort of parade celebration going on today. I seem to have a knack for showing up in cities when there is a holiday going on that I didn’t even know about. I was in Rome on Good Friday a few years back, I was in Athens for Easter this year, and today was the day Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis in WWII. I wasn’t really sure what to make of it, because until tonight I didn’t know what was going on. All I saw were huge groups of people, lots of police, and lots of Russian flags.

I tried to steer clear of the huge groups, and not look or sound too American. No one seemed too bothered with me, so it was fine. It was pretty amazing to see this beautiful city in all its glory. It was a really nice sunny day, so I spent a couple hours walking around, checking out the sites at the Red Square, the Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral.

I grabbed dinner at Subway, which was outrageously expensive, so I got a taste for how much money I’m going to spend here in the next week. I got a footlong sandwich and a drink, and it cost €13. Just ridiculous. I’m absolutely exhausted now though, so I’m going to get some sleep, and then head out tomorrow to check out some more stuff in the city.

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