Aeroflot was an excellent company and the flight to Moscow was very pleasant. Due to heavy rainfall we spent our first evening mostly inside our hotel room, except for a short excursion up to the airport to get something to eat. Next day we visited the center of Moscow and were pleasantly surprised at its striking beauty. Didn't see any signs of an economic crisis, and the Russians all seemed very positive and helpful. We definitely must return to visit Moscow properly, we thought as we boarded our plane to Bangkok late in the evening.

Day 1 - June 27

Our adventure officially started around 0930 when we left my Ammerud appartment, dropped by the local pharmacy to buy some extra Paracetamol, and then took the airport bus from Grorud at 0958. We arrived at the airport with lots of time for checking in. We were told that our baggage could be sent all the way to Bangkok, even though we were staying one day in Moscow. We decided on this option, since it eliminated the need to find a place to store the baggage during our day in Moscow.

We were quite excited when it was time to board the plane. What would Aeroflot be like? Would it be as bad as their reputation, or was their reputation totally undeserved? On boarding the Tupolev aircraft, we noticed that it looked exactly like....ehm... a normal airplane. There were no chickens, goats or other animals running around in the cabin, the seats were not full of holes, and everything seemed fine. The airhostesses even smiled at us, which was so nice after having had to endure Lufthansa's hostility last year. I also noticed that Aeroflot actually had a row number 13, which is quite unusual for airlines!

However, we had some problems locating our seats 22B and 22C, as only the row number seemed to be given, without any indication of where B and C was. Later we discovered that the sign hanging in the roof, saying "FED CBA", actually indicated that seat F was to the left, followed by seat E etc. We had first thought that the sign just gave the name of some federal organisation called CBA (Communist Block Aircrafts, perhaps? :-) ) , which maybe had built the aircraft or something like that! :-)

The determining moment would however be take off. Were we going to crash right away, or would we survive take off as well? At least the plane departed exactly on schedule 1235. On the runway we noticed that acceleration was not as large as with other aircrafts, but the plane eventually reached the required velocity and took off with no problems. The take off was less steep than with other aircrafts, though, as the plane seemed to rise slowly and majestically to the cruising altitude. Everything seemed perfectly fine, with the only difference being that the engines sounded a little bit different than on other airlines. The sound was a little more high frequent, but the total volume of the noise was not any worse.

The flight itself was pretty noneventful (thankfully!). We were served some food, which I would describe as average flight food. I have had better food, and I have had worse. It was very clouded all the way, so there was nothing to see, but eventually we started descending and had a view to some of Moscow's suburbs. The airport was clearly located far away from the city center.

We landed around 1710 Moscow time (2 hours ahead of Norwegian time). The landing was one of the softest we have ever experienced, so all in all we were very pleased with Aeroflot so far. Eventually we entered the airport and had to stand in line for about 30 minutes before coming through the immigration. There were no problems with the formalities, so only a few minutes later we were standing inside the arrival hall.

We quickly located an ATM and made a withdrawal of 1500 Rubles. We figured this amount should be enough to last us one day, considering our hotel had already been paid for. Now, the only problem was finding the hotel, which apparently was located near the airport. On leaving the terminal building, we noticed a Novotel Hotel right in front of us. I didn't think this was the right one, but still we proceeded in this direction, and soon we saw another hotel across the street from Novotel. This had to be it, as there were no other hotels around.

It was considerably hotter in Moscow than Oslo, the humidity was also much higher and judging from the colour of the clouds, rain would soon start to fall. However, me made it over to Hotel Sheremetyevo-2 before the rain started.

The reception was very large, and the woman confirmed that we were in the right place after I handed her the hotel voucher. She then wanted our passports, and told us to sit down and wait. Apparently, there was some paperwork to be done, because it took about ten minutes before she called us over again. Finally, we were assigned room nr. 536 and given some sort of "identity cards" which were supposed to be shown to the security guards near the elevator. No key was given at the reception, but it turned out that on each floor there was a "floor lady" who handed out the keys, i.e. they had a "mini-reception" on each floor of the hotel! We would see again and again that the Russians seemed very fond of doing things in a labour-intensive way, always employing as many people as possible.

The Aeroflot guy who booked us the room (600 NOK) had warned us that it was nothing special, so we were pleasantly surprised. It was clean, relatively large and had a private bathroom. This was indeed a good thing, since we realised that we might have to spend the rest of the evening there, as it had now started raining quite violently.

However, after staying inside for two hours we were getting increasingly bored, and also quite a bit hungry. Since the rain didn't seem quite as bad now, we decided to walk the short distance up to the airport. The airport was not really very big, and it seemed rather quiet so late in the evening. Actually, I thought it was quite nice, and certainly not as bad as the Rough Guide had made it out to be. All of the ceiling was covered with cylinders, which I thought worked quite nicely as a decoration.

There weren't that many restaurants to choose from, but we eventually settled for some Chicken Pie and a Pizza slice. Prices seemed to be quite affordable. We sat in the airport relaxing for a while. It was quite fun looking at the departure board because there were flights to all kinds of exotic destinations, like Conakry, Lagos and Dakar, which I've never seen at any other airport. Our destination, Bangkok, seemed pretty ordinary compared with these places, but it would have to do for now :-)

Before heading back to the hotel, we wanted to find out where the bus into town left from. This turned out to be very easy because the bus stop was right outside the terminal. According to the Rough Guide, due to mafia intimidation the buses left from a slip road 200 meters from the airport terminal, but this was not correct. Also, the bus numbers given in the Rough Guide were wrong, but this didn't cause any problems since the destination was displayed in front of the bus.

Having these things under control, we decided on exploring the area before going back to the hotel. However, we quickly realised that there was nothing around to explore. In addition to the airport terminal, there was one petrol station and the two hotels, and that was it, except for some forest and open fields. Apparently, the city was quite far away.

Back at the hotel, the floor lady carefully wrote down the time of our return, and handed us the key. It was now about 2330 Moscow time, which was still only 2130 Oslo time. Fortunately, we had woken up early this day, so it didn't take us very long to fall asleep.

Day 2 - June 28

We woke up around 1000, got dressed and went up to the bar on the 7th floor where breakfast was being served. The bar was surprisingly small for such a huge hotel, only four tables, but this didn't matter since only one of them was occupied. Breakfast was quite interesting, consisting of meatballs, bread, cheese, a muffin and some stuff that looked quite suspicious, but probably was some sort of corn. All in all it was a fulfilling breakfast.

In the end, we checked out of the hotel around 1150 and walked up to the airport terminal to catch the bus. We were not sure whether the bus tickets had to be purchased in advance somewhere, or if they could be bought directly from the bus driver, so we tried asking a lady in a kiosk at the bus stop. She didn't speak any English, but we interpreted her gestures to mean that there was a conductor on the bus who came around selling tickets.

When bus 851 to Rechnoy Vokzal arrived it was really packed, though, and we only just managed to squeeze in. "Surely there can be no conductor on such a full bus", we said to ourselves. "We'll get to ride for free". However, we were wrong! After a few minutes, we noticed a woman squeezing her way through the bus, selling tickets to all the new passengers. If the bus is always like this, being a conductor must really be a tough job! She has our full respect!

I'm not sure how much we actually paid for the ride because I only handed her some rubles and didn't really keep track of how much I received back, but it was a very cheap ride. It was not a very comfortable ride, though, standing up and being squeezed by the other passengers for 45 minutes. Oh, I'm really grateful that I'm not a Russian bus conductor on bus 851!

First we drove through some forest and open fields before eventually coming into the Moscow suburbs. Fortunately, we were getting of at the last stop (as was just about everybody else) which was Rechnoy Vokzal, because otherwise it would have been nearly impossible to find out when to get off.

Rechnoy Vokzal was still only in the Northern suburbs, but it had a Metro station which would enable us to get into the city center. The area was quite busy with a large bus station, several shops and people selling stuff outside the metro station.

Inside the station, we were not quite sure how we would explain what sort of metro ticket we wanted, as there appeared to be a system of several different zones. Our first attempt was to show two fingers and say "talony" (ticket). The lady asked us something in Russian which we didn't understand, but we figured it had something to do with our destination, so we answered "Kreml". Then she made some gestures which we interpreted to be a question of whether we wanted a return ticket, to which we said "da" (yes) and nodded eagerly. She handed us two tickets! Simple, wasn't it? Who needs to learn Russian? In fact, it wasn't that difficult to manage the simple things, as the Russians always seemed very friendly and eager on helping you out by using gestures and "finger-language".

We had heard lots of stories about Moscow Metro stations looking very nice, but Rechnoy Vokzal was nothing special. However, a train was running downtown almost immediately, so we got on for the ride which I think lasted about 25 minutes. As we were coming nearer to the city center, we noticed that the stations started looking more like we had expected -- like art galleries! It was tempting to get off just to explore the various metro stations, but we decided on going downtown first. Eventually, we got off at a station called Ploshchad Revolytsii, which on the map appeared to be close to the Red square.

The first thing I remember as we came out on the street was that everything seemed so quiet and peaceful. Together with the misty weather, I thought this gave the place a special atmosphere. We were in the heart of Moscow, a place which only a few years ago was definitely off-limits to most Westerners. Not knowing quite where to go, we walked about 100 meters to the left. As we then looked to our left, there was no longer any doubt of our whereabouts. Through some kind of gate (later we learned it was called the Resurrection gate), we could see Moscow's most famous landmark, the large Red Square, and on the opposite end was St. Basil's Cathedral rising majestically out of the mist! It was a truly spectacular sight; we had seen pictures of the cathedral before coming here, but seeing it live was a different story!

We walked through the gate and on to the Red Square. Now the huge department store GUM was to our left, the Lenin Mausoleum and the walls of the Kremlin was to our right. There were quite a few other people around, but again the atmosphere was one of peace and tranquility.

During our walk across the square, we were approached by a guy who was selling Russian dolls. We had promised our mother to buy such a doll, and the one he was selling looked really nice, so this was a great opportunity. After some bargaining, we ended up paying 300 Rubles for the doll, which I have no idea whether was a good price or not.

The Lenin Mausoleum had closed for the day, so after marvelling at St. Basil's for a while we walked further down to the Moskva river. There was quite a bit of traffic along the road here, so we quickly continued to the right along the walls of the Kremlin. On the other side of the Kremlin we bought a bottle of water and sat down on a bench to eat some of the biscuits we had brought along. Suddenly it started to rain, so we had to seek shelter under some trees. Fortunately, the rain stopped after 15-20 minutes, so we could soon continue our walk around the Kremlin, soon reappearing at the Resurrection gate.

We decided to check out the department store GUM. The building was very nice on the inside as well, reminding us a little bit of the metro decorations. It was very big with several floors, lots of shops, and looking quite luxurious.

Not having eaten since breakfast, we were getting increasingly hungry. The Rough Guide had warned against the food being very expensive, so we decided to take the easy option and just visit the nearest McDonald's. Then there would be no problems ordering the food either, we figured. After walking for a few hundred meters up Tverskaya Ulitsa, we found the restaurant.

Apparently McDonald's is very popular in Moscow because the place was really crowded. We also realised that ordering might not be as easy as first thought, because all the menu boards were written using the Cyrillic alphabet. After having studied the boards for a while, we figured that one of the options probably was a Big Mac Meal, but how were we going to pronounce the Cyrillic characters? Eventually, we took a piece of paper and carefully copied what was written on the board. When I finally reached the counter, I just handed the paper to the girl there, which seemed to understand my writing as she eventually produced two Big Mac meals for us. The cost was about 70 Rubles for one meal, which is pretty cheap by Norwegian standards. (By the way, it might well have worked perfectly well to just order in English, but since we have pretty bad experience with this approach in Poland, we didn't want to gamble when it took twenty minutes of standing in line just to reach the counter.)

The Russian Big Mac Meal tasted like McDonald's normally does, i.e. pretty awful, but at least we weren't hungry anymore. After eating, we walked around in the streets more or less at random until we ended up at the Bolshoi Theatre. It was interesting to compare my expectations of Moscow with my actual impressions. I had expected things to be very grey and rundown, but things were exactly the opposite, at least in downtown Moscow. Most buildings seemed newly renovated and were painted in bright colours! I couldn't see any sign of economic crisis at all!

The Bolshoi theatre was quite nice, so we sat down near a fountain outside to relax. The sun was finally starting to come through making the day very pleasant. We now had wanted to go inside the Kremlin, but according to the Rough Guide, we were too late as they had already closed for the day. After a while we therefore continued walking around the beautiful streets of Moscow, passing the KGB headquarters along the way, and eventually reappearing near St. Basil's cathedral on the Red Square.

We sat down at the Lobnoe Mesto to relax a little bit and then we continued down to the river passing a really huge hotel along the way. Time was now approaching 1900, so we decided to travel back to the airport. We walked back to Ploshchad Revolytsii and took the first train towards Rechnoy Vokzal. However, the train stopped at a station called Sokol and all the other passengers got out. A Russian lady probably saw that we looked pretty confused, because she came over to us and said "Nicht fahren...Naechster Zug". We followed her advice and waited on the platform a couple of minutes for the next train, which took us all the way to Rechnoy Vokzal.

At the bus station people were queeing up for bus 851, and when it arrived at the bus stop, the fight for the seats started. Fortunately, the bus stopped with the doors right in front of us, enabling both of us to easily secure a seat inside. The ride back to the airport was therefore a lot more pleasant than the ride from the airport!

We were back at the airport around 2035, bought some pizza slices and ice cream while waiting for check-in to open. Again, the airport was pretty quiet and it was very easy to find the check-in counter.

However, when we checked in for the Bangkok flight, disaster struck. On receiving our boarding cards, we noticed that we had been placed in the smoking section. We asked the lady to be switched to seats in the non-smoking section, but she said that there were no available seats there! How was that possible? We were among the first in line to check-in. The problem was that people who were coming from other destinations like Copenhagen and Stockholm today had already checked in for the Bangkok flight at the same time as they checked in for the Moscow flight, thereby taking up most of the seats.

This was a complete disaster for us! How were we going to survive ten hours in gas chamber conditions!? We couldn't believe this was happening! After discussing amongst ourselves, we decided that we had given in too easily. We decided to go back to the check-in counter and say we were allergic (which we aren't really, but...), and it would be very bad for us to sit in the smoking section. At least the Aeroflot lady seemed friendly and understanding to our problem. She showed us the layout of seats inside the aircraft on her computer screen, and quite correctly there were no groups of two available seats next to each other in the non-smoking section. But, more importantly, there were some vacant single seats scattered around! Who said we had to sit next to each other?

In the end, we got seats in the middle of rows 39 and 40. The seat row formation was 2-5-2, so this was pretty inconvenient for going to the bathroom etc, but who cares as long as it's far away from the gas chamber! It was really fortunate that the lady was so helpful, reinforcing our good impression of Aeroflot.

The plane was a brand new Boeing 777 and appeared to be full of Scandinavians. It left on schedule at 2325, which is something one really starts to appreciate after having flown less reliable airlines like Lufthansa. The flight itself was really boring because as usual I was unable to fall asleep. On a screen they were continuously showing our velocity, estimated arrival time etc, as well as our position on our map. I like this system because it is nice to know where you are, especially if you're sitting by the window.