Well Life Just Got a Little More Interesting 09-08-09

Our Front Door to our Apartment

Well life just got a little more interesting. I don’t want to sound mean but I just came 8,000 or so miles to move into the projects. The Russian projects. The Apartment is actually very nice. It’s a one bedroom with a kitchen and I hate it. It’s just beyond my comfort level, I’m sorry. It’s a fourth floor walk up and it has a solid metal door for the main door. To get in you hold the numbers 3-5-8. So if you want to come and visit you can get in. You then walk up four flights of stairs to get to the door which uses this cool looking key in another solid metal door and you walk in to this nice place. I guess I have to remember where Russia has been over the last two decades. The end of the Soviet Union, the loss of Industrial monopolies, the contraction of its GDP and how it’s come back from all those hard times to regain its place in the world. I guess I’m just a little surprised where we are staying and our apartment is not a place I would want to stay on while on vacation, but I’m not on vacation, I’m here to pick up the girls and bring them to America and be their father, Teri their mother.
I started writing this when we first got here about I don’t know. I’m so confused about things. I know what time it is here, (5:30am, Wednesday) in Moscow (9:30pm, Tuesday, I think) and back home (2:30pm Tuesday). Yes, I’m sitting up in the nice clean, quiet kitchen in my Birobadijan flat at 5:30 in the morning writing this.
We left Moscow and the Atlanta hotel about twenty minutes outside of Moscow on what might have been yesterday. For you it might have been the day before yesterday, I’m so confused. I shower at night, shave in the morning and try to eat breakfast at breakfast and dinner at dinner and I really don’t know what to do. We left the Atlanta at three thirty in the afternoon. Got to the Airport very early (6 hours) to make sure we got on the plane. Life in Russia is different from home and I’ll tell you about that later. We hauled our bags into the Airport and I felt like we were screaming ‘We’re Americans’ with our oversized suitcases and our three bags and computer bag, or maybe I’m paranoid. Here is some of the part where life in Russia is different. We went to put our bags, these bags that were twice the size of most of the other bags on the x-ray machine and we were slow and holding up the line so they started to wave us through. It was only to get into the Airport, but were we screaming, by our bags, we are Americans and not terrorists? Once into the Airport we walked the length of the short departure building and found a seat, got a drink, a Coke light, no diet, just light (its sweeter then diet without the calories) and sat to wait. I guess we figured there would be things to see at the airport, but there wasn’t. So we sat and read and talked and walked to see if a gate had been assigned to our flight, it wasn’t bad.

Moscow airport

Our flight received a gate about seven; it was gates 25-27, so we went looking for the gates. At the end of the building we were at twelve. So I asked information, yea guys can do that. They didn’t speak English, the first we had run into, but she asked some else and they pointed us the way we’d just come so we went back down there with our two oversized bags and our carry on and our computer through this building that was starting to get crowded. At the end I go through these doors figuring I missed something and ended up in an area called flight operations or something like that. I then did a typical man thing and went back out the gates not asking anyone where gates 25-27 are and told Teri, it’s not in there. Let’s go back. What we thought was gates were baggage screening and metal detectors and the gates were beyond that.
We went through with not problems, got to the check in, got on the wrong line, switched to the right she then closes we got on another and finally we get through. We go up to our gate, gate 9 and get on line its 8:15 and our flight leaves at 8:50. We wait and wait and start to question if we are on the right line, it’s now 8:45. Here is where it changes again from being what Americans expect and what the reality is. We started boarding at 8:55 for a 8:50 flight. We went down stairs to wait in a room looking out on the tarmac for about ten minutes. Later when everyone has arrived we board a bus to go to the plane. Some other American family was on the bus and a young boy kept asking momma why there were no seats on the bus. We board the plane by a gangway (gantry?), it’s one of those things you see in old movies when Kennedy Airport was still called Idlewilde airport. We went up in small groups to give people a chance to sit down and in a few minutes we were seated and ready to take off. A few minutes later we did.
We were about half an hour late and later we found out the movie didn’t work, but the plane, another 767 had leg room and looked and felt newer then our first plane. I couldn’t sleep and neither did Teri, so while everyone else did we read and watched the sun come up. Since we were flying towards the sun it happened earlier and quicker than normal. On Moscow time it happened about 3:00 or so. We landed about 5:00am Moscow time, 10pm New York time and 1pm Wednesday Khabarovsk time. Oh, did I forget to tell you we had a three hour car ride to Birobadijan? We found our translator and drive in the small nice airport and left in a car I’d never heard of, but I think it was a Renault remade under license to a Russian company. Three hours later we sat at a railroad crossing for a half hour because a train had broken down and the gates had closed the road. We swatted fly until the gates went up.
We entered town, the sun was out, big puffy clouds in a blue sky and except for the language difference on the signs we could have been upstate in New York. The style of the buildings was different then America but everything else seemed the same.
We met Nadezda at our apartment took care of a little business (11,140 American) and went to dinner.
Now here is another difference between America and Russia. It was about 5:30 or so and first we went to a bank to exchange money. I still had the money in the money belt and under no circumstances was I going to take it out in public so Teri came up with a fifty, two twenties and a ten to present to the bank which promptly rejected the two twenties and ten because they were not crisp bills. We went to dinner at a place with six tables that our driver said was good, it was. Our translator for the day Youlia, read down the menu and we settled on pork with garlic and mushrooms and I think some walnuts. We had a vegetable, served first of eggplant and tomatoes in a cream sauce sprinkled with cheese, good also. A large bottle of sparkling water and the tab was 475 rubles. At the airport I bought a bag of cookies that I didn’t have to ask for, I picked them from a shelf, and I could read the price and could pay for them without talking and looking foolish and paid 400 rubles. What you won’t do for that.
I’ve rambled on for thirteen hundred words so I’ll cut this short and quickly say after dinner we got groceries in a store about the size of a large Bodega and went home to our flat and I took a bath/shower (later) and at 7:30 went to bed, woke up at 11:30 feeling fully refreshed thinking it was almost morning, being disappointed I went back to bed. At 3:30 discovered my wife awake using the compute telling me she could not sleep. Then going back to bed until 5:30 when I gave up trying, later.