THAT WAS RUSSIA

To clear up a bit of confusion... I am already back in the UK, but I have such a backlog of Russia stories to write about that I'll probably be posting on-and-off for another month or so! The trouble is, you can either live your life or write about it - but not both at once. For the past month or two I've been living my life, and now I'm back in England I have time to write about it. Does that say anything about the two countries? Probably not; just about me.

As you might expect, my departure from Russia - for what may be the foreseeable future - was not uneventful. She wouldn't let me leave without a crisis or two to remember her by. I'll write about it now, even though it'll put my weblog out of sync. I'll trust that you won't all be too confused.

Anyway.

As part of my contract, I had a driver booked to take me nice and safely from my front door to the airport, which is outside the city to the south. As it happened, the driver turned up five hours before my plane was due to fly, and such un-Russian time-keeping started to make me suspicious.

About twenty minutes into the journey, the driver, Artyom, who I know passingly well, said:
'James. I have very busy day today. If it is okay I will drop you at the train station and you get fast train to airport, yes.'

Normally I wouldn't be too happy about this, but as I knew the driver and had taken the very efficient, quick and clean airport train before, I agreed. Of course, this meant that we now had to drive into the centre of Moscow rather than round the ring road. It also explained the five hour buffer the driver had allowed.

We got within three hundred yards of the station and the traffic ground to a halt. Five minutes passed; ten; fifteen. We inched forward a little and could suddenly see the problem - a tram had come off its track and veered over into the incoming traffic, blocking two lanes. It was obvious that we weren't going anywhere for a while, and though I still had three and a half hours until my flight, I only had fifteen minutes until the train to the airport was due to leave.

Artyom made a split-second decision. He drove the car up in front of a builder's yard, jumped out, and started hauling my enormous suitcase out the back of the car. 'Come on, James! Run!' he implored, and started to leg it down the street with my handluggage, leaving me to handle 'the beast'.

Now I doubt you've ever run down a busy, potholed pavement with a 30kg+suitcase on wheels chundering along behind you. Even worse, it was one of those very scenic but completely impractical streets with trees planted every 15 metres right in the middle of the pavement. It was like Ultimate Pinball, although I think I did well only running over three pedestrians, a small dog and myself (twice).

I made it to the train, retrieved my handluggage, bought a ticket, and was seated in a carriage before you could say 'angry mob'.

The next obstacle to a successful journey home was the check-in desk. A BA staff member took me out of the queue to a special frequent flier zone just because I had an 'e-ticket', which was nice, and I was even assigned a staff member, 'Tanya', to look after me. Inexplicably, there was a camera crew hovering around but I ignored them long enough to heave my suitcase up onto the conveyor.

'Thirty five kilos, sir,' Tanya said, unbelievingly. 'I'm afraid that our absolute maximum is 32.' And I know from experience that you often have to pay excess on anything over 26.

So there I was, opening my giant suitcase on the floor of the airport. What could I take out? Aha - my jacket. Never mind that I was already holding my winter coat and the temperature outside was a balmy 25. And I was wearing my thickest jumper and jeans just to bring the weight down. And look - my towels! They're heavy.

I removed my towels and checked my bag - hovering around 32 and a half kilos - without being charged excess. At the time I assumed it was because I was boarding with the magical e-ticket (which either gets me privileges, or creates confusion, depending on whether the airport staff know what the hell it is). There was another possible reason, which came to light later.

But in the meantime, I was left on the ground floor of the airport with a trolley stacked with - one very large piece of hundluggage, one winter coat (I was wearing my jacket), and six assorted fluffy pink towels. There was no way I could go anywhere without at least securing a plastic bag for the towels. After begging the BA desk for one (which was unsuccessful), I had an idea. It's the kind of idea that always seems to be original and unique when you yourself have it, but later you realise that not only has everyone else had it before, so have you. The idea was to buy something small from a shop, and thus get a plastic bag with the purchase. Genius, eh?

The only flaw in my plan was that I was on the ground floor, and the shops were on the first. The only was between the two seemed to be by escalator, and have you ever tried getting a trolley onto an escalator? The only alternative - carrying all my handluggage by hand - was promptly ruled out after the first attempt resulted in towels scattering to the wind. It's only now that I realise the irony of having handluggage that is impossible to carry by hand. Although trolleyluggage isn't as catchy.

At this point I had the realisation that the likelihood of me getting the towels to the plane were slim, and even if I did so, there was little chance that I would be allowed to board with so much luggage. So I decided to bin the towels. But could I find a bin in the airport? Of course not. It's an airport. Again, I had several options. I did consider leaving the terminal briefly to dump the towels in a bush. But I thought that that would like highly suspicious and probably end up with me being arrested. I also thought about asking my friendly friend at the BA helpdesk to dispose of them for me, but one look at the condition of the towels (remember - they had been on the floor, and not machine washed for six months) and I decided not to inflict that on him. Even though he couldn't get me a plastic bag.

To cut a very long story long, I finally managed to buy a newspaper from a kiosk and stash the towels in that. That was the last major obstacle but I was then nearly scuppered by my own idiocy.

When I had checked my bag in, my personal assistant Tatiana told me that I would be boarding from Zone C, Gate 3. After I found a bag for the towels, I looked up to see Gate 3 written boldly on the sign above me. I of course followed the arrow round to the left to the gate. Now stop me if I'm wrong, but a good way to number gates and zones would be like this:

Zone A Gates 1-5
Zone B Gates 6-10
Zone C Gates 11-15

- and so on. Instead, this airport had decided to number them like this:

Zone A Gates 1-5
Zone B Gates 1-5
Zone C Gates 1-5

- and so on. So in fact there were a number of Gate 1s, Gate 2s, Gate 3s. And I had the right gate number but the wrong zone, and therefore the wrong gate. Of course, I didn't realise this at the time. 'But there are security checks,' I hear you say. And you would be right. And on this particular day, the security check involved me trying to give my documents to the officials, and the officials waving me through.

It wasn't until I was past security that I realised that my fellow travellers were all, how should I put it, a little bit darker-skinned than me. They looked neither particularly English, nor especially Russian. Just to be on the safe side, I decided to double back and ask one of the officials where exactly this flight was going.

'Uzbekistan.'

Oops.

Fortunately I had time to leave this gate and find the real one. Once again I went through the security checks - slightly more rigorous, but again not objecting to me having three items of handluggage. Oops, I bought some cigarettes for my mum so by this time I had four.

I got to the gate itself only to be greeted by along table filled with champagne glasses and other refreshments.

'Have some champagne, sir,' one BA staff member offered.

It turned out that BA were celebrating one year of flights from that particular airport (earlier, they had flown from Sheremetievo in the north). Perhaps this was why I hadn't been charged for excess, especially with a camera crew hovering.

In the end, I made it back home without further adventures, and even managed to stash three of my four bits of handluggage precariously in the overhead locker without them falling and injuring my fellow travellers.

FIVE GO TO SERGEEV POSAD, OR, YES I AM A BIG GIRL'S BLOUSE

I mentioned in passing that Gareth, Anthony Ian and I went a while ago to visit a friend of Gareth's, Marina, who had invited us to stay and look around her home town of Sergeev Posad for the weekend. SP is one of the towns of the Golden Ring, that historical region to the North East of Moscow. You may remember that I toured round part of the Golden Ring with my dad in May, though due to technical difficulties we never made it as far as Sergeev Posad.

Even among the Golden Ring towns, Sergeev Posad is special, in that it is the centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, and home of the Patriarch, head of Russian Orthodoxy. Think of it as a kind of Russian version of the Vatican City. But without a history of deals with the Nazis.

The three of us met up with Marina in Moscow (you may remember that Ian was having a nosebleed at the time), and took the train a couple of hours out to Sergeev Posad. Marina actually comes from the next town along, the rather less significant and dynamically named town of 'Farm' (in Russian; probably not many rural peasant farmers there speak English).

As it was already evening, we decided to head straight for Farm and look around Sergeev Posad the following day. Surprisingly, there wasn't a great deal to see in Farm and Ian had even stopped bleeding so Marina suggested a barbeque in the woodland by the edge of the lake. This is a typically Russian activity (it involves breaking things, burning things, destroying nature, meat, and drinking), so we gladly accepted.

Three of Marina's friends joined us for the barbecue and our first task, as dictated to us by Marina, was gathering wood for the fire. All Russians are expect fire builders and so Marina took charge of that, while the rest of us went back and forth lugging armfuls of firewood and worrying about snakes.

A much greater peril than snakes, however, in the Russian forest, is mosquitoes. They are big, they are hungry, and they swarm. Our barbecue, as I have said, was on the banks of an admittedly very beautiful lake and so with all the water the mosquitoes were even more numerous than usual.

I was walking back to the fire with an armful of wood when a particularly huge mosquito - about the size of a daddy longlegs, and this is not poetic license - landed on my hand. I gave a little squeal and tried to swat it with my other hand. This other hand, I had forgotten, was holding firewood so all I managed to do was hit myself on the head. I dropped the wood in a heap - the mosquito still hadn't moved - and swatted the thing as hard as I could. It exploded in a great splat of what I hope was my own blood. I must admit it - I screamed.

Gareth was nearby, also collecting firewood, and this is what he heard:

SQUEAL! I see the mosquito.
THONK! I hit myself on the head.
CRUMP! I drop the wood.
SLAP! the mosquito is dead.
SCREAM! I am a big girl's blouse.

I then come staggering out of the wood with my bloody, swollen, hand held out in front of me like a loaded gun.

"Bloody hell, James, what's wrong?" asks Gareth with concern.
"Mosquito," I reply.

THE SEVEN PLAGUES OF IAN - PART TWO

I did not mention it before, but Ian does not have much luck with metro trains. Once, when he was on a train with Gareth and I, he failed to even make it off the carriage at our destination before the doors shut and the train whisked him somewhere else. Gareth and I were left on the platform looking gormless and wondering if Ian had the sense and the ability to find his way back to the station.

Another time, his shopping bag split just as he was stepping off the train - resulting in oranges and other (unfortunately round) foodstuffs rolling about on the carriage floor. There we were, the three of us, desparately scrabbling about between peoples' feet trying to retrieve fruit before the doors closed.

From the time of my previous post, Ian's luck continued to be poor. He managed to get assaulted in a train station late at night, misplace his passport, and break our front door for a second time. Somehow, though, he managed to make it all the way to Kazan for a job interview. Wonders never cease... at the moment he is working up in Zelenograd in Moscow Region for Language Link. Zelenograd is widely known of the Stevenage of Russia. Looks like Ian's luck isn't improving...