Anyway last time I left you was in Samara and it’s semi-nude river bathers .. about as far away from La Grande Jatte (if you know what that picture looks like) as you can get.
Me and Nelly eventually escaped in the middle of the night and in a totally packed TU154 (the Russian equiv. of a 727 but bigger and with less power .. a great combination as you then have to accelerate like mad and go a great long way down any runway just to get into the air and even when that is achieved you seem to do an anal tour closer to the ground than usual. The fight was AWFUL and I was tres happy it only lasted two and a half hours. Packed out with about 150 (half of them children) and Nelly and I fought to keep the seat between us empty .. more to N’s efforts who was in her grandmotherly and VERY formal way telling people where to sit.
The problem had started with the fact that we had seat numbers and again the crew decided that it was better to abandon them . wud just love to see a BA 747-400 boarding under those circumstances !!!! So chaos reigned and the crew hated us all to a man, even before we got off the ground. It was just grim and I was tres happy to land in Yerevan at some ungodly time in the middle of the night…. and it’s a rough runway there (why should I be surprised ???) so felt like the wheels had been removed and we were running along on fast eroding legs.
But the worst thing was and this really gave me the willies. was the fact that 1 realised that as we were skimming over the threshold that no less than three of these grim looking flight attendants were happily standing up in the longitudinal front galley, with the open flight deck door ahead. Had we landed with a bump (or more of a bump than usual) they wudda accelerated fast onto the flight deck and hit the those nice levers that put on the power and we would have gone accelerating to an uncertain end. Boy, did 1 give them my best black looks when I got off….
On arrival in Yerevan, capital of Armenia (in case your geography around here is not up to date) we were actually allowed to walk from the aircraft to the terminal, which was a first, as they have a love of buses all over the old Soviet empire. And they like to make you suffer too. It is considered quite normal to put 60 pax onto a 45 maximum-by-law bus and then keep them slowly roasting, before even launching off to or from an aircraft. Inbound they had us crushed on the bus and then made it a double whammy at the other end as when we arrived at the terminal and were obviously just getting to know all our sweaty neighbors’ armpits, they kept us dangling and then when we got off, we had to wait for someone with a key to unlock the door …only plus was it wasn’t raining ! Honestly it’s an adventure every moment of the way and anyone who complains in Europe or the USA does not have much of a leg to stand on with me.
Well we gets off and in and get to immigration. I am well prepared with my visa, but of course no one on the plane has given us any forms and of course form filling here is a way of life. esp when international travel is concerned. So I looks and looks and there is nothing .. the line at immigration is positively zipping along by former-Soviet colony standards, so I shows the passport, open at the visa as they will never find it and the man just looks at it and I am IN … what is the world coming to ??? I’m still expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder with a handful of forms. which of course will only be in Cyrillic. Bags of course take ages and when they do come I discover that practically everyone travels with identical bags .. hardly Samsonite or the like, but the thin striped blue and red nylon bags that are the staple of the third world. Of course they are all identical and no one has ever had the idea of putting a bit of ribbon on the handle or painting their name along the front (which I am sure Mrs Amarida Ghosh of blessed memory would have done), so all is confusion and it is very hot and we have all had enough of the night already. When my green Travelpro pull along thingy turns up, it is riding around in state.
This is more than enough for now … just wait until you meet Elvira, 45 at least, with the push-up bra and enough make up to paint a hoarding…
timothyvalentinestravels 