7/2-7/4 -- The travelling part

The flight from San Francisco was delayed 4 hours because the plane that left Dusseldorf was delayed. The reason it was delayed was that they encountered a technical issue shortly after leaving Dusseldorf, had to re-land, and fix. Although the delay has been frustrating for everyone involved -- the pilot, the passengers on 2 planes, all the missed connections and the ticketing agents who had to deal with grouchy people and pay the cost of hotel, etc -- I'm still glad they made sure the plane was safe instead of having people die. Sure, I miss a day of Moscow, but at least I'm not dead. Germany is also not a bad place to be stuck -- sure, I have no Euros, so I'm kinda stuck at the airport hotel, operating within the confines of the hotel vouchers, but most people speak English very well, and everything is organized, courteous, and functional. I turned on the TV and flipped through a lot of dubbed American shows, and ended up on some German family comedy, perhaps like 7th Heaven. I wish I understood German humor -- serious one moment, silly antics the next. The show seemed to be about a priest and his family, and has dramatic moments around buying fishing bait in a shop, and not being able to sleep at night because the neighbors were having loud sex.

Dusseldorf airport is really weird. The airport lobby was like a real lobby -- with clusters of armchairs and cafes and stores. It is spacious and airy, more like a train station than an airport. The dominant airline here is Air Berlin. Many screens tell you which counters to check in. I like how fluid the space is. From there I go a few short paces to customs, or "PassKontroll", which is a different world altogether. The space is winding and cramped, with many cordoned off areas. The area seems more like a "behind-the-scenes" warehouse area, with unadorned walls that have parts unpainted. There is no air conditioning. From their I enter the gate area, and once again everything is air-conditioned, bright and airy. I felt like I was in a shopping mall -- stores and shops line the hallway, duty-free perfume assaulting my senses -- with the gates nowhere to be found. The gates turned out to be tucked behind the stores, as if up a side alley. At the gate, everything is once again coarse and functional, two gates in one small area, with a door beyond leading to stairs down to the tarmac, and with just enough seating for the early-arrivers like me. No outlets to be found, and on one column, a clear un-painted outline of something that used to be there but was ripped out.

There are no drinking fountains here -- maybe it's not required by law? Travels abroad always makes me think about federal regulations.

7/4 -- Moscow night

Met up with the Lemur and CS Bear downstairs from our apartment at 6pm Moscow time. Apparently the street downstairs from the apartment is a pedestrian way filled with cafes. We're also about 5 minutes walking distance from a Kremlin and a 24 hour supermarket that turned out last night to not be 24-hour. I got a nice cold soup at the cafe, and then after briefly unpacking at the apartment, we headed out to buy train tickets and then find a restaurant that Joanne saw on the guidebook as having Central Asian food and on the river.

Train tickets were relatively painless, despite the fact that no one spoke English. CS Bear had a whole dictionary in his shorts pocket, so we looked up the word for "tomorrow", and the rest worked out. What was more complicated was figuring out the subway. It took us a while to realize that standard subway signs are in blue, and are not related to the color of the metro line, despite there being a light blue and a dark blue metro line. Also, exits are not always entrances. So we totally took the wrong line, but it was all right, because the subway stops are breathtaking -- wrought-iron chandeliers, arches with filigrees, mosaics of Lenin leading the Revolution, etc. I didn't bring my camera last night, but what I loved were the small details. Even the lamps on the escalator were beautiful and stylistically in tune with the rest of the station. The metro trains come once every 3 minutes or so, so we never had to wait long, and they went super-fast, so going on the wrong line wasn't too bad. Tickets were about 25py, which is a little less than $1. The trains themselves aren't high-tech or jazzed up with lots of ads or monitors, but they were super-functional and clean. They were also designed for tall people -- not many low hand-holds.

The restaurant we went to was called "1001 Nights", and it was actually on the river, but tied to the river's edge -- it bobbed whenever a riverboat went by. I got horse meat with noodles. The horsemeat was very tender, and its juices drenched the large flat noodles under it, making it very tasty indeed. I also got a salad. Salads here are mostly composed of 3 or more of the following: cucumber, tomato, radishes, eggs, meat, potato. I sense that this isn't a very leaf-based society. Every half hour or so, they would crank up the music and a bellydancer would make her way around the tables.

After the restaurant, we walked the 3 miles home along the river, encountering an amusement park with a mock Space Shuttle, and a large statue in the river that seems to be Peter the Great standing on a ship that's on a wave that has lots of little ships in it. It was bizarrely awesome. (Our first view was head-on, like this, so it was hard to figure out what it actually was as we slowly walked towards it. (Here's some better views) Next to the statue, on what the map said was a chocolate museum, was a roof-top rave.

We stopped by McDonald's for ice creams and water at midnight, and made it home shortly thereafter. It didn't feel that late, thought, since the sun had set at around 11pm. I woke up at 4:40am and the sun was up again. Yay Northern Hemisphere in the summer!