Moscow!

The flight arrived on time despite a delay of an hour to wheels-up. Passport control had no line to speak of.

Now to see if my luggage arrived with me!
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

A fairly long day...

There are flights during which I cannot sleep at all, and others during which I sleep deeply. Today's flight was somewhere in between, where I woke every now and again. Still, I made it to Moscow and managed to get through the day without falling asleep, or wanting to.

I dropped off the items Galina had given me for her sister and picked up a GSM USB modem that will probably come in useful in Baikonur. I then met and caught up with some folks from my end client.

Working a launch campaign these days is a lot like going to summer camp, except we're not off to have fun and games. Indeed, there's serious work to do, but as I've done this before with many of the same people, there's a lot of common background in play, too.

The modem seems to work fine, though I've elected to sign up for the minimum plan (while in Moscow) that provides 20 MB of downloads for about $3 a month. (I've blasted through 750 KB so far.) Roaming from Baikonur will cost about 6 rubles per MB, or about 16 cents per megabyte, which sucks, but sounds pretty good for a plan B.

After meeting up with a bunch of folk from the client organization, I joined them for dinner at Goodman's, and we walked down a deserted Tverskaya (which is a little like seeing an empty 5th Avenue in Manhattan). By the time we finished dinner, the avenue was filled with parked armor and missile carriers.


I was a little struck by the youth of the tank crews. Most of them are younger than Drew and look as if they are barely old enough to drink milk without supervision.

That got me to thinking about the ever-rarer species of veteran Red Army men and women, who will be the focus of the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the victory in what is known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War." There are lines from Shakespeare's Henry V that come to mind here:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-

Replace references to the saint with the 9th of May, and you get a fair approximation of how folks feel, both officially and otherwise, about the Soviet victory. Despite the sophistication of the modern world, many newlyweds here still visit the Grave of the Unknown Soldier after tying the knot to lay the bride's wedding bouquet at the eternal flame that burns in that soldier's memory.

Time to get to bed. We are slated to leave the hotel tomorrow at oh-dark-thirty.

Cheers...

P.S. Gotta be careful with the background processes on my computer. I'm now at 11.2 MB and have no idea what consumed all that bandwidth!