A weekend trip to Moscow

Since I have been a consultant I have traveled a lot. Almost every week I head out to a client site away from home. Some of these are a short commute say Milwaukee, others are farther away such as Long Island, while others are just plain hard to get to like Dayton Ohio. But all of these places can be traveled to inside of half a day of traveling, and all of them have been domestic. Now that RG is in Moscow though I need to travel a lot further than I do on a regular basis to see her. In fact it takes at least 14 hours to get there though I have not done it in less that 18 yet. Therefore the round trip travel time is a whopping 36+ hours! The first time I went it actually took even longer because the return took 3 legs and a bus trip from one end of London to the other (don’t ask but sometimes you can be to cheap for your own good). That trip though I was in Russia for 2 weeks and it was certainly worth the travel.

Well this November when I used the second entry to Russia allowed by my visa I wasn’t as lucky as the first time. I only had from Thursday night to Monday to spend in Russia. This means that I had a total of around 95 hours for the whole trip. Of course about 40 of these were dedicated to travel so I was there for about 55 hours. Of course 55 hours with RG is well worth 400 hours or more of traveling but it goes by so fast you wonder if it was a dream that you were even there. In fact it feels a lot like a dream because your internal clock has absolutely no idea what time it is, whether you should be awake or asleep, or if is truly morning or night. It doesn’t help that in the winter Moscow is always over cast and the sun only comes out for maybe 6 hours.

It was fun though to tell people I was going to Moscow for the weekend. Of course I tried to act like it was no big deal, like everyone just pops over to Russia for a day or two. MQ and CQ thought it was funny and I’m not sure they understand it. The way I see it though I go were my wife is and she happens to be in Moscow. Therefore I go to Moscow, at least for now! It is also a pain though because even though I took a day off I was staffed on a project and they wanted me there first thing Tuesday morning. This means that I got home from Russia at about 3:20p and had to take a taxi home to get more clothes then straight back to the airport right away. I ended up flying to New York at 7pm. That is less than four hours after an international trip to turn around and fly out again. Crazy.

The trip to Moscow it self was good. We didn’t go sight seeing or doing anything crazy. Really we just hung out most of the weekend. The one cool thing we did do was go out to dinner at a really nice, and somewhat historic restaurant. The place we went is about two blocks from the old KGB headquarters and was the private club for KGB officers. I don’t know if the decorations are still the same as they were. You sit at couches and easy chairs around the tables and there is a pretty nice and modern looking bar. The food was absolutely splendid. I had some Sea Bass (still on the bone) and I think we split desert. Shortly before we left it was funny to notice a large group of Americans that came in. The restaurant was relatively empty, probably because it was cold and also because we went early. Many people in Russia do not eat dinner until 8 or later.

On the way back to the apartment we also stopped by Red Square. I had been there on my last trip but only during the day. It is a completely different experience at night. The old government run store that lines one side of the square was covered in large white lights, Saint Basil’s was lit with flood lamps, and the Kremlin towers also glowed from below. This time I was also able to get up close to Lenin’s tomb. The whole scene was both surreal and beautiful. It was also cold. Moscow was cold enough in the fall, in the winter it is brutal. Though I suppose it isn’t that much different than Minneapolis, you just have to brave the elements more to get from place to place. Sunday night we went to some friends of girls apartment. They are Americans I think doing missionary work at some school. They were very nice and hospital and it was fun to hear what they go through living in Moscow. But of course the whole trip was to short because before I knew it, it was Monday morning and it was time for me to fly back to the States. Hopefully next time I will get to spend more that 55% of my time in Moscow and less percentage of time traveling!