I’m now going to Vladivostok. This had not been on the original plan, but I had had such cold feet about PK, that I thought as it is only two hours away and I have never heard of anyone going there, then perhaps we should. I suggested this to the office in Seattle and they said yes, so I said I will organize a flight and you find a hotel and someone to show me the sights. This meant a visit to the travel agency in the hotel (most Russian hotels seem to have a sort of travel bureau) and the lady there spoke quite good English and she pounded away on her keyboard and I looked at her screen and she was surprised that I could read and understand it (but it was all in English, so I was probably faster than she was). I could see that tomorrow there were no seats in Y but C was available and that was all of $50 more so I said, take it and she did and a ticket whizzed out and I was done. What could Business Class on Vladivostok Air be like ????  Watch this space….

Meanwhile in the hotel, I had to move rooms, as was now staying another night and moved up in floor to be downgraded in class. The single bedded room (and the bed was about the right size for a not too picky 12 yr old) was tiny. Still no water, so my bucket was provided. The one and only light was two neon tubes right over the window (and one of the tubes was in flicker mode) and the one switch was half way up a wall and not reachable from the bed … oy oy oy  Why do they put things together like this ??? It takes genius to make a room so horrible. Outside it was raining again, which made a dreary town, 100% worse, so some useful time writing up all my notes from the previous days. In the dining room, at night, I am the only client. I miss the lady in the red dress very much.

I rise early and a taxi is summoned and we zoot off to the airport. Down all sorts of backroads too, through the birch trees all shining from some rain and I begin to wonder just where the hell we are going as I KNOW the way to the airport and this is all new. But somehow we get there and I am too early (for Registration, as you well know) and sit on a nice hard seat and watch the gang arriving. It’s awfully busy for first thing on a Sunday morning and there seem to be flights going all over Russia and they all want to leave within the same hour. There’s a nice big IL-62 sitting outside, from the splendidly named Kras Air, from Krasnoyask, which is a major city in Siberia and I remember taking this aircraft there a few years back and am glad that it is not taking me now, as it’s somewhere I hope never to see again.

Anyway, the man wrapping bags in plastic hardly takes a breath and the rather battered looking, exceedingly red-haired woman on the info desk, who also is in charge of the public address system, is spouting forth and addressing us like some political rally. She looks like she has been there for ever and is definitely a mine of information and with her flyaway glasses could be a distant cousin of Dame Edna Everage, though Dame Edna would never admit it. She pops out from behind her desk at one point and I get the chance to admire the fuzzy bright yellow mules she is wearing .. looks like she forgot to put her shoes on before she left home this morning, but then I remembered that in Uzbekistan a couple of years ago, the woman doing the same job in Bukhara was similarly shod. Must be a union thing.

Eventually the Registration is open and we all file through the one and only door, trying to keep our bags and children and tickets and dogs and coming undone plastic bags and geriatric grandmas ALL TOGETHER and then to the check in desk and I get my boarding card and it’s pink and I have a seat number 1A no less. So we takes our seats for the next wait. A young Korean man is in a panic of being left behind and bounces off the severely faced Ludmilla who checks all boarding cards as pax board buses and at one stage he comes and sits next to me, so I make sure he sees my boarding card and he looks at me and says “Vladivostok?” and I say Yes/Da and have no clue what a simple word like that is in Korean, but anyway he sits down a lot more calmly and I just hope I don’t screw up and manages to get us BOTH left behind.

Next time, meet the beautiful Anna, graduating in English from university. I expand her vocabulary with the useful words nobody ever teaches you ….