Almost packed...

I finally left 92A-50 at 1:30 pm and ate lunch. In the course of the meal, I found out a rather vigorous schedule of trips had been arranged for town starting at 2 pm. As I had been rather hard at it during the morning, and since Vladmir V. didn't feel like doing the tourist thing, we swapped positions: he became the "on call" interpreter and I went to town for a few hours.

I never tire of watching the people in such places. At one corner, I found an old man, with more wrinkles in his face than you can imagine, having an animated conversation with his cat, which was sitting on a folding table sunning itself while its aged master hawked packs of Kazakh cigarettes.

For practice, I walked past the produce vendors (and managed not to buy anything, despite numerous offers), and just walked around keeping my eyes open. I took a few photos, but it'll be a couple of days before I get to moving them from my camera.

I'm in the first shift of interpreters to go to the airport tomorrow and support loading of the Antonov. I'm almost packed, and have just come downstairs to return some DVDs, paperbacks, and some other borrowed items.

It's going to be a busy day tomorrow after I get some sleep (look at the time!). The transport is due around 9 am, which means we'll be leaving around 8:30, so I better be completely ready to go by 8. Unless something goes wrong with tomorrow's planned schedule, I'm intent on going home on Monday morning.

Cheers...

Sittin' in the lobby, watchin' all the girls...

That was me about an hour ago, as I sat in the lobby of the Marriott Aurora waiting for my sister-in-law. A regular parade, it was.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This morning was a lot more difficult than I expected, maybe because I got to sleep late last night. There were a lot of little things to support, such as a piece of the cargo plane's empennage surface falling off somewhere between Moscow and Baikonur (that sent folks scuttling for sheet aluminum and bolts, as well as aluminized duct tape). Also a number of small frustrations.

Around noon, I went back to the Fili to clean out the room and eat lunch. Then everyone at the Fili piled into the bus for the trip to the airport, where I was selected to stand by the metal detector and instruct people to take all of the metal out of their pockets.

You'd expect a bunch of technical people to know about how metal acts in metal detectors, but you'd be surprised. One of the team members perfunctorily took off their glasses, put them in the plastic tray, and said they were ready for the metal detector. Not only the the device register metal, but in the course of the wand examination, enough metal was extracted to probably patch the Antonov's empennage.

The flight back was uneventful, with the usual copious quantity of food and the body-punishing seats. Much the same could be said for the trip back to town; the major pain there is having the bus make so many turns trying to find the best way to the hotel.

Eventually, my sister-in-law came and I gave her the stuff I had intended, walking her back to the Metro station.

I have a 4:15 am wakeup tomorrow for a 4:45 am taxi to the airport for a 7 am flight that will end at 8-something in the evening, Mountain Time. In other words, it's going to be a l-o-n-g day, and I better go back to the hotel and get some sleep.

Cheers...