Hi All!

I made it to Moscow safely!

The trip started out a little rough.  I had an issue when I got to the airport in Atlanta and tried to get my boarding pass.  For Russia you have to have a visa and my visa says I have to be out of the country by May 19th.  My Delta flight is out of Amsterdam on May 23 – I’m taking a train out of Russia on May 18th to Helsinki.  I was going to get my train ticket when I got to Russia but apparently I had to have proof I was leaving by train before they would give me my boarding pass.  After about an hour at the ticket counter, the Delta lady finally booked my train ticket for me.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to go.

I exchanged $300 to rubles at the airport so I would have some local money when I landed.  The guy at the exchange counter said he only had 100 bills and nothing larger.  I said that was fine – when I got a stack full of money, I realized I just got $300 in essentially $3 bills.  Each $1 is 30 rubles – my wallet is really fat!

The flight was about 11 hrs and there were probably 20 kids under the age of 3 on the flight.  It was noisy!  When we landed in Moscow, they had people come on board the plan to check for people with the swine flu.  The “inspectors” were in yellow vests and were wearing masks.  They had therrmal cameras and scanned everyone to get their temperature.  Michelle just had this on her flight over so I was expecting it but it was still strange.

Michelle arranged for a car to pick me up so getting from the airport to the hotel was a breeze.  The traffic was unreal – it put Atlanta traffic to shame.  On the way to the hotel, we passed an Ikea, a Gap, a Sephora, and a ton of car dealerships – looked like home!

I’m at the hotel now and just got up from a 3 hour nap.  Michelle’s back from work and we are going to dinner with some of her co-workers.  I think we are going to Cafe Pushkin – it’s supposed to be the best restaurant in Russia and is in the Red Square.  It’s the one restaurant that I wanted to go to so I’m excited it’s our first stop!

I’ll email more later and will send pictures too.

Love,

Emily