Happy Mardi Gras!
I’m back in Moscow after a rather early morning flight. The weather enroute was just lovely and I was able to trace our route of flight via their inflight magazine. We went right over Dresden, a city I still haven’t seen and really want to, as well as over Warsaw and Minsk. The demarcation line between snow and no snow was somewhere just past Warsaw so there is hope that we’ll be snow-free sometime in the next two months. We flew right over Moscow and the views were incredible with little sparkler like flashes, as the sun would hit the golden domes of all the churches. Parts of the Moscow River are open and the runways and taxiways are completely clear and clean.
Today is a holiday in Russia, as well as most former communist countries. It is International Women’s Day, which started 100 years ago as part of the suffrage movement. Seems like it is now a cross between Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and you don’t want to go out to a restaurant tonight. I thought with the holiday the traffic might be light and I could take a taxi. However, because it is a legal holiday, the taxis can charge supplements, in this case a very hefty supplement and the trip would have cost about $85. I demurred in favor of the train to the Metro, which only took about an hour today and cost about $16. The Metro was jammed with folks carrying flowers for either mom or wife or girlfriend, and since this is Moscow, there were some guys with two sets of flowers, most likely for wife and girlfriend. This holiday has been transformed over the years, and as this article points out, not for the best. Holidays also bring out the beggars and the Metro had quite a few today, adding a sense of local color and a scent of eau du bum.
My flight today was at 8 am but we were told, via an email, to get to the airport early due to new security concerns. I had checked a bag so I really didn’t have much in the way of ‘dangerous’ things, but I was still ‘selected’ for a secondary search. Goodness the Germans are thorough, in fact, so thorough that had they been any more diligent I could have skipped my next colonoscopy! This of course created lots of problems and delays and several people missed the flight since Lufthansa doesn’t wait for anyone. I arrived at the airport at 6 am and the join was jumping. Frankfurt Airport has been completely renovated and it is very, very upscale now. All the funky little stores, cafes and bars have been replaced with international brands. Gone is the little grocery store that used to be in the basement where you could buy last minute German items to take home. Even the duty free stores only sell the big international brands and I can’t get my Italian brandy in Frankfurt any more. The price of change sometimes isn’t worth the price.
So, time to go and see what I’ll do for dinner tonight. Cindy should be home soon and even though it has only been one week, it sure seems longer.
Ciao, wm
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