Five or so hours sleep put the traveler into a stage of extreme fatigue; that’s five or so hours over 42 hours, thousands of miles and twelve time zones. Needing to stay up late, but totally unable to do so, he crashes to shuffle on his iPhone around 7:00 PM local time and, despite a high-volume conversation in the hallway, he falls into a deep sleep convinced that 6:00 AM will come too early. Unfortunately, 11:00 PM comes first and time zone insomnia with it. He opens the window and listens to the sounds of the city.
Some things are the same no matter where you stay. Cars in motion all night, car alarms, police sirens, conversations, and the thumping sub-woofer of local dance clubs. Tonight there is also some poor sap trying unsuccessfully to get a woefully out of tune car to remain starting. He guns it and gets a few feet before trying again. Over and over. Finally, it catches and he guns it in what can only be a cloud of smoke and an engine begging for oil.
Thoughts of the day come to mind.
Sheremetyevo airports. Any air traveler through Moscow has experienced the insanity that is Sheremetyevo 1 and 2. “1” was built in 1959, about the time that eight people a day would fly while “2” was built in time for the opening of the famously boycotted 1980 Moscow Olympics. While safety is rarely an issue, convenience always is. There are not enough seats for waiting passengers, not enough restrooms, not enough line space at Sharometyeva 1 and entirely too many assertive taxi drivers and both. The traveler wonders why both aren’t plowed under or completely renovated. He wonders if landing in an open field would not be better.
The international airport (“2”) is pretty clean and has designated smoking areas outside the main seating areas. The domestic airport (“1”) was built for about 1/10th of the traffic that it currently handles. The smoking area is pretty much gates 8-17, where the lingering blue gray second hand haze waits as a carcinogenic welcoming committee. By the time the flight leaves the traveler has smoked a pack without lighting up.
The traveler also never quite gets accustomed to the fact that lady custodians clean the men’s restrooms without ever fully closing them. This time was better, though. A mop across the doorway refused a goodly number of anxious men, but did not completely solve the issue. At least one fellow stepped over the mop handle to take care of business anyway, while even those who waited for the obstacle to be removed (like our faithful traveler) found themselves hearing the “swish, swash” of the mop whilst standing at the urinal. She never spoke and neither did he.
The drunk. Aeroflot is the official, though certainly not only, airline of Russia. With a significant number of Soviet era aircraft still in service (a few seem not to have been painted since Brezhnev), it always is a crap-shoot as to whether the plane looks and acts airworthy. Thankfully this was a Boeing 767, the plane secure and the flight smooth.
Alcohols tends to flow freely on Russian flights with many of the smaller bottles that Americans are familiar with giving way to flasks. The traveler remembers another Russian flight where flasks gave way to fifths before the plane ever left the runway and in-flight luggage rustling for another when the first bottle of vodka went dry.
About four hours from Moscow, one particular lush missed his seat by about twenty rows, settling beside a woman of about twenty who was playing video games by the seat light. Behaving as friendly drunks are wont to do, he made a boor of himself until two flight attendants herding him and his stupidity back to his seat. At landing the traveler was amused to see two green uniformed Russian policemen enter the plane and meet our friend Otis in the back. He was escorted, quasi-sober, to a waiting police van that surely had been used in the old M.A.S.H. TV series. No one really seemed to car since public drunkenness, though a problem, is not a crime in Russia.
The ticket exchange. The travelers’ companion had need in the afternoon to make a change on a return flight, thus both experienced the undeniable inefficiencies of Russian business, learned, no doubt, from Russian government. With the advent of the internet, heck, with the advent of the telephone, these type changes take fifteen minutes back home: call the airline or the agent, ask for another flight, put charges on the credit card, print out the new ticket (or have it sent to one’s PDA or smartphone) and live the rest of your day. Oops.
Russia is a cash society–no checks and not a lot of places that take credit cards, so few people use them. They two men arrive at the S7 office to find just four people in the “line” to be served, most for ticket changes or purchases. Two and a half hours later they were leaving. One lady behind the counter serving every customer. Three copies of this, two copies of that, “Do you have a passport and your birth certificate?”,”Can you sign here?”, cut this paper with scissors, tape these two pieces together, walk to the copier/printer/fax (the one for the entire office). If one did not know better, the temptation would be to think the entire process was intentionally designed to delay. A second lady in the “travel agency” section of the office who was incapable, unwilling or incompetent to help, spending only about thirty minutes of the total time working. The rest of the time she was talking or walking through a mysterious door just off the lobby which, ostensibly, housed more employees who were doing nothing.
The lobby waiting area was entirely too small, so people were constantly going outside to smoke (for which the traveler was thankful), make phone calls or go buy something to drink at the corner store. There being no actual queue or “Please Take A Number” gizmo, each new arrival simply asked, “Who is last?” and then assumed his or her place in the proceedings. The traveler noticed that no one ever got mad, ever stomped out, or cursed out the employees contrasting starkly with his homeland where threats would have been made, promises of a class action law suit would have been offered, constant, loud complaints would have been leveled and the only helpful employee would have likely been equated with her gender of canis familiaris. But, since there is no expectation of efficiency, there is no problem when none is experienced.
Traffic grid. The traffic in Krasnoyarsk cannot touch the traffic of Novosibirsk, another Siberian city several hours away by air, but is trying to match it in spirit. Lane cutting, poor street layouts, make-it-yourself parking and bold-beyond-brains drivers combine to make it an strange experience. The street layouts are such that you must constantly be watching the signs, rather than the road, in order not to miss your left hand turn. If you do miss it, there might be several blocks before the middle line breaks open to allow the correction. Inexplicably, the names of the roads are not on road signs, but are on the sides of buildings creating a situation in which drivers have to constantly be looking sideways for street information rather than straight-ahead for the automobiles, trucks and buses. Adding to the chaos is the strangeness of their only being one traffic signal facing the driver and it isn’t overhead, it’s on a sign post where the street sign should have been. The lighting sequence features yellow light in all directions with each change from red to green or green to red. The yellows are supposed to encourage caution from all drivers that the traffic flow is about to change. Instead it encourages those going from green to red to accelerate and those going from red to green to leave the line early. The traveler also notices an almost equal number of left and right hand cars, learning that Siberia is the used car lot for Japan.
12:46 AM. Eyelids are getting heavy. Perhaps sleep will return after all.
