We're Here!

And we're back in Russia! After a long day...night??...of flying we arrived in Moscow early this morning (Monday). Our flights were uneventful and pretty much on time...we did get some weird food on our flight from New York to Moscow. We flew Aeroflot this time, which is a Russian airline, so we got Russian food. One of the meals was some beef thing, which was your typical plane food, but they served it with a side of cold green beans and tuna salad.

Odd. Then for breakfast we had the choice of an omelet or a hamburger (for breakfast??)...the omelet was served with a side of nasty looking sandwich meat and shredded carrots. Interesting combinations. One of our meals was served with the best looking dessert ever. It was some type of chocolate mousse/cake thing, but man was it good. Hands down best airline food I've ever had. :)

Once we got to Moscow we had no problem going through Passport control, getting our luggage or going through customs and Val, our rep here, was waiting for us as we exited and we even made it to his car within his free 15 minutes of parking.

 

The traffic here is unreal! The 18 mile drive from the Sheremetyevo airport to our hotel, Courtyard Marriott City Center, should be 20 minutes with no traffic, but it took us almost 2.5 hours. Val said once it took him 4.5 hours to make the same drive. Wow. I enjoyed the drive though, I love being new places and seeing everything around me.

Once we got to our hotel they allowed us to check in, even though it was so early (this picture was taken tonight...sorry you get all the lame pics that didn't warrant pulling out our nice camera...we will try to remember tomorrow to take more with our phones of actual exciting things so that you don't have to see pictures of green beans. :) ) They got major points for that since check in time is not really until 4pm and we got here before 11am. We took a nap and then headed out to do a little exploring. We found Red Square, which is just a few blocks from our hotel, and saw St. Basil's Cathedral, the Kremlin, the big red building that I can't remember the name of...we stumbled upon a mall and ate dinner at somewhere distinctly Russian. McDonalds. Haha. So, not exactly Russian, but we wanted something fast because it was getting dark and we didn't completely know how to get back to our hotel...it's quite difficult when all the road signs are in Russian. :)

McDonalds was an interesting experience in and of itself, as the menu was all in Russian as well. Thankfully we did see a small paper menu that had pictures and English, so we grabbed that and as we were standing there an employee came over to us to take our order on a little electronic device that he had in his hand. Then he printed a little receipt thing and we took that to the counter to pay and wait for our food. I had never seen that before. Somehow we actually got exactly what we ordered, even with the language barrier, which I was pretty impressed with. They also served shrimp wraps and other stuff that I could not even recognize from the pictures...I love visiting McDonald's in other places and seeing local cuisine...in Hawaii they had pineapple, I think rice (but I may have just made that up), and taro pies. Here, I can't tell you what they had, other than it was not what we have. :)

On our way back to our hotel (which we did find our way back to...yay!) we stopped at a coffee shop and had an amazingly good Americano.

Oh, we also stopped to get some bottled water at a weird little kiosk looking thing and had some mass confusion communicating with the cashier (the products were all behind a glass wall, so we couldn't just bring our purchase to her.) Thankfully, around Moscow there normally is someone around that speaks, or at least understands, some English, normally it's young adults, and there was a teenager there that translated for us and helped us check out. Whew. :)

Now we're back at the hotel, ready to settle in for the night. Our medicals are tomorrow, so wish us luck!

 

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