Departure morn...

Predictably, my normally smoke-free mouth feels as if a platoon of miniature infantry hiked up and down its length several times during the night. Such are the wages of having smoked one of Cuba's (presumably) finest stogies.

Providence exacerbated my punishment by selecting exactly this past night to allow the battery in the smoke detector in the hall outside my room to weaken to the extent that the device began to emit a short but loud (and intermittent) "chirp" that successfully roused me from sleep several times during the night. Eventually, I just couldn't sleep any more. It's still chirping.

It's no biggie; there'll be an opportunity to sleep on the plane. :^)

So, what are my impressions of what I've seen and experienced? Well, given my previous travel in the USSR and post-Communist Russia, a number of things were familiar: the high incidence of seeminly suicidal drivers, the strange toilets, the wildly non-standardized plumbing fixtures and installations (contrary to one of the Three Laws of Plumbing, the hot water faucet is not always on the left side here). I could go on, of course, for quite some time given an opportunity (I have to start packing), as so many things - both big and small - are different.

The one major thing that struck me about this place - Area 95, it's called - is the unreal mix of utterly dilapidated buildings (think of the South Bronx, and allow your pessimism full throttle) and buildings where people actually live and work. The people here, as in most of the former Soviet Union, are masters at Making Do.

Anyway, I really do need to wrap this up and get my stuff packed. Next stop will be Moscow, and I hope to find an Internet cafe there from where I might be able to post again. Ciao.

Cheers...

It's been a lo-o-ong day!

The group I was part of, which was leaving for the airport to supervise loading operations, left the Fili a little behind schedule just after 9 am. We were approaching the airport when we first felt, then heard, and finally saw the Antonov transport aircraft as it flew directly over us on its final approach into Yubileinyi airport. (Apparently, the center line of the road we were on coincides with that of the air strip.) The road veered soon after the Antonov passed us and we pulled into the airport area a couple of minutes later.

The basic assignment for the day was to load the contents of several railroad cars onto the aircraft, which was leaving for Uliyanovsk, en route to Nice, France, taking a relatively small number of Alcatel and ILS people, including Galina V. Everyone else involved in the launch campaign was flying back on a Clintondale Air charter later in the afternoon.

The work went fairly smoothly, and there actually wasn't much for me or Olga to do. The major piece to be loaded was the container in which the satellite had been packed for transport to Baikonur. According to a sign on its side, the container weighs 18 metric tons, and it took a truck-mounted crane some time to get the container off the railroad car and onto a set of rails that had been erected in front of the Antonov, after which it was winched into place using the Antonov's own bridge cranes.

Around noon, the hotel delivered a number of bag lunches, which were pretty substantial. Doug, Conrad, and I sat in the shade of a big flatbed truck and chewed on our lunches.

The charter arrived around 1:30 or so, as did the crowd from the Fili, which proceeded to file into the customs building. Olga, an Alcatel engineer and I were prevented from moving to the customs building by the arriving aircraft. Then again, we'd just finished doing a quick exploration of the Antonov (the airplane is big; I'll post photos later), including a short trip to the flight deck on the "second" floor.

The rest of the day really is not interesting. We finally made it through customs, the flight made it to Moscow, and in the end, it took longer to go through inbound customs and passport control at Sheremetevo and drive into the downtown district than it did to fly from Baikonur to Moscow! When we arrived, there were cop cars on 16-inch centers in front of the hotel, which forced us to disembark from our bus about a half block from the front door and carry/drag our luggage to the front door. It turns out the hotel's jewelry store had recently received new baubles, and were hosting some kind of do for their regular customers.

When I looked at my ugly kisser in the bathroom mirror at the hotel, I was surprised to see how red my face and neck had become, despite my wearing my "Indiana Jones" hat. Ah, well. Into every face a little sun must shine.

There remain, by the way, 20 minutes of rented time for me to finish this post... I am at an Internet salon on the bottom floor of the Okhotnyi Ryad mall, in what used to be called Manezhnaya Ploshchad.

This Internet salon has a stainless steel theme, and boasts over 200 computers. Each station consists of a Genius keyboard and mouse and a Samsung flat LCD monitor. The machines are running Windows 2000 Pro, and the browser I'm currently using is IE 6.0.2800.1082. There is an annoying band of blinking advertising across the bottom of the screen, which cuts off about an inch of the browser's area.

Rates here during "standard" time basically run a ruble a minute ($1 = 30 rubles or so, so that works out to about $2 an hour). There are also prime time and off time rates, but I don't remember them off the top of my head; they are, respectively, higher and lower than the standard rate, but not by much. A page-sized ad upon login advertises a "game zone" that you can use for 20 rubles per hour, or 90 rubles for an all-night session.

I'm going to call it a post and then check some e-mail and surf until the system cuts me off.

Cheers...