Finally

I made it to Moscow again, finally.

Three weeks ago, I had planned and booked my trip to Russia, to Moscow and Murmansk. Unfortunately, I didn't get my visa in time, and 2 hours before takeoff, I had to cancel everything,

New attempt this week, and no problem with visa this time. I have a double entry visa to Russia valid till September.

We arrived in the airport with the difficult name (S airport) around 3 pm today, and booked into our hotel. It's a great 5-star hotel called Swissotel Krasnye Holmy, located a ten minute walk from our Moscow office.

This evening, we walked down to Red Square to see the St Basil Basilika and the Kremlin. But, dammit, the camera on my cell phone didn't work, so no pictures from Red Square, unfortunately.

(Back in the hotel, we stopped in the bar and took a beer, and guess what, suddenly my cell phone had decided to be co-operative again. The picture above is my only shot today; Baltika 7, local Russian beer, fairly good, but not comparable to the fabulous Sibirskaya Korona)

The S airport

I’m sitting on the plane to Moscow. We just passed, Lake Peipus, the big lake on the border between Estonia and Russia. In an hour or so, we’re landing on the Sheremetyevo Airport. The name is impossible to pronounce. I just call it the S airport.

Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Turgenev often did this way. I’m not talking about the airport, but more general. In many Russian Classics, there are characters called Prince F and Countess N and so on. They were probably real contemporary persons, being anonymized in the novels.

Some guys from our Russian subsidiary will meet us at the S airport. Then we go to a nearby hotel, where we have booked a room for a pre-meeting. Tonight we fly north to Murmansk. The domestic flight is operated by an airline called Nordavia. I think it’s a subsidiary of Aeroflot.

Murmansk is the largest city north of the Arctic Circle. In the Soviet time, it was the head quarter and main base of the Soviet navy. Since then the population has declined from more than half a million to about 300.000. Murmansk is a gateway to the Arctic Ocean. The world’s biggest fleet of nuclear-powered ice breakers is operated from there.

The main meeting is tomorrow. The country manager will do most of the speaking on behalf of our delegation. I’m only dealing with the technical and scientific part of it. I’m supposed to keep my ears and eyes open and my mouth shut … if I can.

We will see tomorrow.