Russian Holiday

The whole process of getting to Russia makes the phrase “Russian Holiday” seem oxymoronic, or just plain moronic. It took weeks of effort on my part and on the part of our heroic travel agent to get us there. From the visas, to the agencies necessary to guarantee hotel rooms, to the emergency evacuation insurance it is a three-ring circus of bureaucracy and forms, not to mention fees, fees, and more fees.

It isn’t news to anyone that it takes a long time to travel between Los Angeles and Russia. Our flight from LAX to London was straight out of a Chevy Chase vacation movie but without his extraordinarily cute dimples. The toilet in our section broke, the lights malfunctioned so that they had to be all on or all off (mainly off – surely no one planned to read on an 11 hour flight), and we were seated with a troop of badly behaved college kids off to Oxford who cared not that they were keeping the other 300 people on the plane awake with their senseless and loud yammering (“Like, can you believe it??”). The vile students were asked, quite nicely, to SHUT THE HELL UP, but chatted on. I thought briefly about tackling one or two of them, but these days airlines seem slightly skittish about passenger wrestling at 35,000 feet, so I kept my seat belt fastened and seethed very quietly in the pitch dark. We arrived in London bleary eyed and cranky. The long line to get through passport control disappeared in the blink of an eye when a kind staff person pulled us out of the mayhem and sent us to the charming British chap responsible for processing the passports of families traveling with young children. The British passport control experience avec offspring was so lovely, so speedy, so utterly smooth and fabulous that I plan to bring someone’s children, really anyone’s, with me whenever I go through Heathrow. We were soon in our small airport hotel rooms ready to settle in for a night of jet lag ravaged sleep. My oldest son was up most of the early part of the night, collapsing in exhaustion just as the younger one awoke. My cumulative sleep time clocked in at 24.2 minutes leaving me a joy to behold the next day. No one said that international travel was easy and if someone does you have my permission to look them straight in the eyes and yell “LIAR!”

The fond memory of getting through Heathrow in a jiffy the day prior quickly faded as we stood for 90 plus minutes in a stifling hot, crowded, cattle pen – I mean passport control area, in St. Petersburg. Nothing even vaguely resembling a line ever materialized. We just stood, a large sweaty mass, inching ever so slightly forward, warily eyeing the frightening and austere cubicles that lay ahead of us. Once we reached passport control many uncomfortable minutes passed with much document stamping and rustling of papers and then finally – we were through. No one pointed a finger at me and shouted “Foreign Spy,” before they dragged me off to a locked and padded cell. However, even without that particularly unlikely scenario, as a non-Russian speaking tourist the whole passport control ordeal was enough to convince me never to return. Warm and welcoming is certainly not in the Russian authority vernacular.

The final insult in our arrival to Russia was a brief and stressful luggage fiasco that as fate would have it, affected only ME. We were the absolute last people to clear customs and when we reached baggage claim the only bags that remained were ours, or so we thought. We tossed our luggage into the transport van and made the drive into town. Our hotel, the Angleterre, was actually quite charming and I threw open my suitcase so that I could tear off my flight and cattle-pen soiled clothes. “No,” I gasped. It couldn’t be. There were only four lonely bags left in the luggage claim area. I couldn’t possibly have ended up with someone else’s bag. But yet, I had. My handsome Harringbone suitcase was not filled with neatly packed cotton t-shirts, cropped pants and sensible shoes – rather it was a jumble of crumpled men’s dress shirts, some fine British millinery and a lone tweed jacket. My chest heaved. My heart sank. Three weeks in Russia with not a single item of clothing save the skanky shirt on my back. My vacation was only five minutes old and already it was a disaster. I sprinted down to the lobby to plead with the kind desk staff for aide. They made one phone call. Just one. In the land of failed logistics and impossible bureaucracy was it possible that there was actually a single ray of light? A disheveled and distracted British Professor had my bag. He’d already phoned the airport and had reached the very person to whom we were speaking. Better yet, his apartment was around the corner and he arrived, bemused and apologetic, ten short minutes later and personally handed me my bag. My matching v-neck cotton shirts never looked so smashing. I bathed. I put on clean clothes. I celebrated the little things in life.