The first time I traveled to Russia was in 2006.  Oksana and I split our time between Moscow and St. Petersburg, because while she is originally from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in the Far East, her family happened to be spending time in the big city.  Her brother, Andrey, played host and seemed to have an all-day itinerary planned for us every day we were there.  We were exhausted by the end of our “vacation,” but looking back through our photos, I’m amazed at all the things we got to see and do in just three weeks.

I always felt guilty for not writing much about our first trip through Russia.  Even way back then, I had a mental list of things to write about for one of these “Thoughts On” blog entries.  When we crossed the border into Russia again last September, my notes were already full of half-remembered items that I jotted down on the bus from Estonia.

Russia

Asking “What is Russia like?” is like asking “What is the United States of America like?”  How do you answer that?  When a country spans most of a continent, has citizens from every socioeconomic background, as well as a history dating back thousands of years, you can’t just sum it up in one or two sentences.

I’ve seen two of the biggest, most prestigious cities in Russia, a couple larger cities in the east, and passed through many a rural town on the rail line between St. Petersburg and Irkutsk.  About the only thing I know for sure is that Russia isn’t easily summed up.

I can tell you, however, that there’s a strange dichotomy when Russians think about their own country.  On the one hand, there’s the feeling that Russia is the greatest country on the planet.  Mention that you’ve been to the world’s largest lake and they’ll tell you that Russia has the world’s deepest.  Describe to them how something is done in the States and they’ll explain to you why the Russian method is better.

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Imagine this:  Months ago, you found a great deal on an international airline ticket and you decided, on the spot, to change your travel plans in order to take advantage of it.  You bought the tickets, received itineraries via email, and promptly forgot all about them.  Then, on the day before your flight, you decided to hop online to see if you could do a web check-in, perhaps get early seat assignments.  That’s when you discovered that your flight had been rescheduled for the day before and had, in fact, departed two hours ago.

That’s what happened to Oksana and me in Moscow a couple weeks ago.

Let me back up, tell it from the beginning.

We were in Aswan, Egypt, at the end of July.  Our next couple of weeks were planned out, but we had a deadline on the horizon.  My Russian visa, which we’d obtained in Argentina, had set dates.  I could enter any time after July 1^st, but I had to leave the country by the end of September.  We wanted to spend at least a full month in Russia, so that meant we only had one month, August, to travel through the Middle East and Europe.

While searching around for flights online, Oksana stumbled on a remarkable deal: One-way, Moscow-to-Bangkok, SriLankan Airlines tickets for $339.40 each.  The date was perfect, September 28^th, but we were planning on entering Russia near Moscow and traveling to the Far East over the course of our month-long stay.  Oksana spent a few more hours crunching the numbers and discovered something interesting: Even accounting for one-way tickets back to Moscow from Kamchatka, we could still fly to Thailand for around half the price of booking tickets out of Vladivostok.   On the spot, we decided to cross the whole of Russia twice and booked our tickets through Orbitz.

Fast forward to September.  We entered Russia via Estonia and spent a week in St. Petersburg.  From there, we took the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Irkutsk, then flew to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy – Oksana’s hometown.  We spent a couple weeks there with her brother and actually changed our airline tickets so that we could get back to Moscow sooner and spend an extra day there.  Our Aeroflot flight left on the 27^th at 5:30pm and arrived in Moscow, nine hours later, at… 6:30pm.

We crashed early that night, with the strangest case of jetlag I’ve ever experienced.

The next evening, around 7:30pm on the 28^th, Oksana decided to get online and see about our seat assignments.  Our flight was scheduled to leave the following day, on the 29^th, at 5:40pm, but she couldn’t find the flight anywhere on the SriLankan Airlines web site.  Confused, she went back to her email and dug up the latest message from Orbitz.

At first blush, nothing looked awry.  The big, bolded sub-head still read “Moscow to Bangkok 9/29/11,” but further down, the itinerary actually began with “Wednesday, September 28, 2011.” That’s where she noticed that the flight had left right on time… just 24 hours before we expected it to!

A careful read of the rest of the email turned up this phrase in a teeny-tiny font size:

Hi! This is from orbitz. Please call orbitz because there has been a schedule change in your reservation. Thank you.

Click to enlarge

Oksana looked up from her computer. “Oh my God.  I think we just missed our flight!”

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