The Sheremetyevo Airport D Terminal is far nicer than I had expected from online descriptions of the airport. It’s downright pretty. Upon deplaning, I race up the stairs, avoiding the slow escalator, and attempt to make my way past as many people as I can to get through passport control quickest. Luckily, as it turns out, a great many of the people are heading to domestic connections, and I then turn left at a fork in the corridor that only a couple people follow. I have a Robert Frost moment briefly, and then I reach the tollbooth-like passport desks. Most of them are labeled “Russian Passports” except for two on the end, which have no lines. It’s nice to have flown in on a Russian airline, crowd-wise.
The Passport Control officer doesn’t speak or smile or do anything that could discern him from a robot as I hand him my passport and immigration documents, smile (to match my picture), and say, “hello.” He goes back and forth between my main page, my visa page, and my migration card, putting each one under a scanner, scrutinizing every detail, gazing up at me, and never opening his mouth or changing his facial expression. I stop smiling.
After finally being cleared to cross the threshold into baggage claim, I then find myself waiting more and more patiently as almost everyone else receives their luggage. I have a knack for getting luggage near the end, but it’s more worrisome when I’m more than 6000 miles from when it was last supposed to be. It also switched airlines and had to move from the extreme southeast of the airport to the far northwest of the runways. Luckily, it comes out at the end, and I am free to meet my driver, who by now has waited at least an extra hour for me.
The driver looks startled to see me. I guess he was getting close to giving up after waiting so long. He holds out his hand and I assume I should shake it, but actually he just wants to take my luggage. Oh well, I tried to be nice. I start apologizing for making him wait so long but he smiles back in way that signals he doesn’t really understand what I’m saying. He has a stereotypical Russian look to him—I can’t really describe it any other way. He also has huge hands, which command the steering wheel like a champ, which I will quickly learn one must do to avoid an accident in Moscow.
The driving experience was just a hair shy of insane. On the road/highway leading up to the airport, there is either a lack of parking lot/garage space, or people don’t want to pay for parking, and there’s no law against parking on the shoulder. Maybe it wasn’t a highway and maybe that’s just the way parking is (it seemed to happen a lot from what I observed since), but cars were everywhere, and people were crossing the road back and forth. Turn signals are also rarely used for switching lanes, and people will switch lanes so suddenly that it’s scary. There was a lot of fast braking, both for pedestrians and vehicles. I now understand why Schlumberger’s first course is about defensive driving. I’m still crossing my fingers that the vehicles provided will be automatics. I never got the chance to really practice stick-shifts.
The drive takes us through a “quick” survey of Moscow, starting near the airport where there are some big dilapidated buildings reminiscent of parts of Detroit, followed by some very beautiful homes in upscale neighborhoods. We follow this long, aimless wooded road that is like a New England country road. We eventually reach the main city itself, as the buildings rise up around us and the traffic slows. “Moscow traffic. Problem, problem,” my driver says, in the longest “sentence” he’s uttered since the airport. I have a fun time watching the plethora of different buildings go by, trying to guess which buildings were built before 1917, during the Communist Era, or after 1990. It was actually pretty easy to tell. We eventually reach my hotel, the Renaissance Hotel, Monarch Center. It is quite classy. After checking in, I go to my room and discover that I’m really starting to like this whole “provided by the company” thing.
I head back to the lobby with my laptop, because the wi-fi is free down there, and I happen to meet Jeff, a fellow American in my OFS-1 class who will also be joining me in Drilling and Measurement in Krasnoyarsk. We decide to go find Sarah, the third American, who I knew already from the interview process and the mutual experience of being barred from entering Angola and waiting unknowingly for several months.
After eventually all meeting back in the lobby, we stroll out to get some food. We had searched the pamphlets in the lobby for something good to do but did not have all that much luck, save for one that said, “The Best of Moscow Night Life.” It turned out to be mostly for gentleman’s clubs, escort services, and an erotic, all nude beauty salon...
I realize I’m the only one who has figured out the Cyrillic alphabet, so I’d be responsible for reading each place we passed to try to figure out what it is. We pass an Uzbekistani restaurant, and I wonder what it’s like, but it’s on the other side of the really busy street, so we choose a little basement café that leaves our clothes smelling of smoke. It has a very diverse menu for how big it is. There is also a statuette of Laurel and Hardy on the counter, which seals the deal for me. After attempting to order several things and being told by our waitress that it’s not possible at the moment, I settle on a “Cordon Bleu” and it ends up being pretty good.
We head back to the hotel and call it a night, because we are all exhausted. I decide to get the internet for my room so I can catch up on this week’s shows on Hulu, only to learn that Hulu can only stream in the US and Japan. Bugger. This really throws a monkey wrench into my newfound following of about 15 different shows as of this season (not that work won’t). Luckily, I brought a Kindle. I eventually try to sleep, but for some reason I can’t even though I stayed awake since leaving Boise. Excitement or over-active adrenal glands, maybe? I manage only an hour or two before waking up at 3 AM, worried that if I fall back asleep for good and really get comfortable, I’ll oversleep through the morning appointment to get our work permits and finish up other legal paperwork. So I stay awake.
In the morning, we meet the three other new hires that will be in our OFS-1 class, a Mexican, a Nigerian, and a Saudi Arabian. We all pile into a shuttle van and go on our winding way through the confusingly complicated roadway network of Moscow. After a while, it seems as if we’re going in circles, because many of the buildings look the same and we keep crossing the river. It turns out that the river just winds a lot through the city. We reach the non-descript FMS office, where we get the VIP treatment by getting called to the front of the line (eliciting looks from several surly-looking men) and into the office where we sign this massive registry and receive our work permits. I’m really starting to get used to all this personal attention, but Jeff says that they call this the “Honeymoon Phase.” I silently hope that I never have to deal with a divorce phase…
After obtaining our snazzy new work permits, we are ferried to the Schlumberger Moscow offices, in a cool commercial and shopping center called Metropolis, which also houses offices for Hewlett Packard and some other international oil firms. I can’t find the Justice League headquarters, though... We are taken to a small break room at the corner of two hallways, with glass walls that make us feel like we were in a fishbowl. Some of the employees enter as well, and we finally get to put faces to the names of people with whom we had been in contact regarding visa applications. We sign our final pieces of paperwork to make us feel like we are officially employees and legal residents, and then we are set free for the day.
After our driver returns us to the hotel, we reconvene and decide to take the Metro to Red Square. After all, we can’t have come all this way and spend two nights in Moscow not to at least see the most famous, historical portion of the city. We board the green line, which is possibly one of the deepest subway lines I’ve ever been in (see picture of escalator passageway). Each station is unique architecturally, and the trains run surprisingly smoothly compared to other large subways I’ve ridden.
We reach our destination and then break out the cameras. Red Square, Lenin’s Tomb, St. Basil’s, the Kremlin… everything I know about Moscow is here. Speaking of the Kremlin, am I the only person who pictures something like this image whenever I hear the word Kremlin?
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| Horrible Photoshopping, I know. But I was using Microsoft Paint. |
All kidding aside, it is definitely a spectacular place. And the buildings are about the cleanest kept things we see in any part of Moscow. There is a bunch of scaffolding set up in the square for some sort of large event, possibly involving Putin. Or maybe it is just a rock concert, where Putin is the main event, blasting out a mean guitar solo with no shirt on…
Behold St. Basil’s:
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| Me and Basil |
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| The Men |
Unfortunately, we picked the day that it was closed, so we take an excursion to the massive shopping center, GUM, that resides on the square opposite of the Kremlin. It’s basically a large mall with better architecture.
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| This times 3 |
Once we’ve decided that we’ve done enough tourist stuff, we make our way back into the Metro and head to the hotel. I’m super tired, but I want to work out before bed, because I haven’t done so in several days. The hotel has a really nice fitness center, and I set about doing my usual routine, but can only get through 6 sets before I decide that my body hates me and I should just shower and go to bed. It’s not even 6 pm, but I have to wake up at 3:30 for our flight and I want to make sure I can actually sleep. Sure enough, I pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow.
I wake up before 3:30 and am able to get everything packed pretty easily. I head downstairs and check out, and then the four of us who happen to have the same flight to Tyumen all pile into the same van. For once, the traffic isn’t bad, and we make it to the airport within a half-hour. We’re back at Sheremetyevo Terminal D. We get to go through security twice here—there’s a metal detector and x-ray machine at the entrance to the terminal as well as the standard security checkpoint before the gates. I’m excited to head toward “Domestic Check-in,” because I’m pretty sure this is my first time ever flying domestic in another country.
This plane is an A319 and it’s a lot better looking on the inside than the last Aeroflot plane. The seats were a nice royal blue color, rather than the burnt orange of the other plane. The flight was less than half-filled, and I didn’t see anyone in first class. Jeff and I both had entire rows to ourselves. I kicked myself because I forgot to give the man at the check-in desk my Delta Skymiles number, which should have gotten me a free upgrade to first class because of my Elite status I had just attained on the way to Moscow. It was okay, though, because I still had plenty of room, and the flight attendants gave us plenty of attention. The flight was only 2 hours and 40 minutes, which would have managed us just a drink and maybe a packet of peanuts in the US, but we got a full meal and several passes from the drinks cart. We also had the signature Aeroflot cup holders again!
The Tyumen airport is a bit less advanced than Sheremetyevo. There are no jet ways, and I’m not even sure how much there is of an actual passenger terminal. For a city of a million people, it’s weird to see such a small airport. The Boise Airport is bigger than this. I guess we are pretty spoiled in the US. After deplaning, we hop on a bus that ends up taking us less than 200 yards to the baggage claim area. I’ve walked much further in other airports. I guess they didn’t trust anybody to be walking out on the tarmac. The baggage claim is quick and simple, at least, since the bags are being put on the conveyor just outside the room in which we’re collecting them. There is also a lady who checks your luggage tag against your ticket to make sure you’ve taken the proper bag before you can leave the building. I like the idea, but it’s really annoying.
We pile back into another shuttle van, joined by an Azerbaijani reservoir engineer in town for some other training classes. He speaks Russian, so he can actually guide us through what to do when the Russian driver drops us off at the Russian-speaking security point. After about a half hour drive along a tree-lined road away from town, the blue and white modern complex of the Siberian Training Center emerges, complete with its own drilling rig. The Center is only a couple years old and sits by itself in a large field, sticking out like whatever the good version of a sore thumb is. At the security checkpoint, we once again hand over our documents and get our little welcome envelopes with our key cards.
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| Sunset over the cottages. |
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