A Slow March To An Even Slower March: Flying To Moscow

On(1) our 8:35am (BMT) morning flight to Moscow I ask a flight attendant for a can of Heineken because: 1. I'm about 18 hours into my day and that doesn't seem too outrageous a request; 2. I'm terrified of flying; and 3. though I do understand a can of beer is unlikely to unspool and unkink the causes/manifestations/symptoms of the all the aviatophobia I've developed in preparation for this trip (and every other trip I've ever taken, too), there is the undeniable fact that In Certain Situations Beer Can Do Certain Things and it's this sort of lifelong guiding principle that moves me to order. The energetic gentleman in charge of the beverage cart and too the cabin gives me a look that is surprised and conspiratorial in a "birds of a feather" kind of way and says, "Well I can't yet --- this is just tea and coffee -- but as soon as I'm done here I'll find you one!(2)" Here he gets a little closer to me than would be expected and says, "It's twelve o'clock somewhere!" and laughs in a way that is meant to be a warm nudge in the ribs and he also does a thing with his eyes because he's, you know, crazy and even though I manage to fall asleep not-too-much-later(2.5), when I wake up 30 minutes before wheels-down there's a can of warm Heineken and a plastic cup on the mini-tray to my right and the attendant himself smiling over me the way cats do when they are thinking about stealing your breath/soul/etc.

I'm headed to Moscow with a friend named Brandon because Moscow serves as one end of the Trans-Siberian Railway and for something close to a year (see: http://blog.pennlive.com/trans-siberian/2011/06/tso_blog_presents_on_how_we_go.html) we've been working up a trip on the thing(3)(3.10). To get to Moscow Brandon's wife drives us to the Philadelphia airport and there we sit around for two hours and nearly miss our plane because dinner is so nice and so is the glass of wine that comes along next to it and then we take a hugely pleasant British Airways(4) flight from Philadelphia to London on a 777 that smells clean and flies quietly and has a pretty great movie list(5) and in Heathrow we spend an hour or so drinking coffee and eating breakfast and shopping and generally enjoying ourselves and then we head to our gate for the "hop" from Heathrow to Moscow and it's here that the trip immediately goes from One Thing to Another Thing Altogether. On the over-crowded monorail that feels manufactured only for flights to Eastern Block nations -- which takes us from our arrival gate in Terminal 5 to, you know, our departure gate in Terminal 5 -- the air is hot with sweat and there's an angry woman whose Broader Shoulders Than You'd Expect Given Her Height are making a lot of contact with my body "intimately" and she's very loudly warning her children that she may just "leave them on the landing" if they don't get whatever "it" that is not currently together, together. At the displaced gate itself a crazed red-haired gentleman(6) has the closest thing to a temper tantrum a grown man can actually have because the person on the other end of the telephone "probably could have given a warning about not being in the system!". There's some cursing, etc and as the argument becomes really volatile -- the red head is shouting and his face is a few different colors and he has his phone in the crook of his neck so he can move his arms more with more lunatic menace -- I do that thing where I sort of look for someone nearby with whom to meet eyes so I can bulge them in a way that says, "Red heads, right?" but the argument doesn't register with anyone else around me because apparently at this gate such behavior is de rigeuer and I find that alarming. As we board the plane Brandon and I notice small differences between Plane 1 (Philadelphia to Heathrow) and current Plane 2 (Heathrow to Moscow). Like, That One Stain on the carpet. Like, the light fixture above our seat that is broken/pretty close to ending up in our laps. Like, the partition between first and second class that seems to be missing whatever screw/bolt/attachment airplane partitions have to keep them from shaking really violently to the timbre of the engine. Like, the beleaguered flight attendant who will say over the PA +/-fourteen times, "You -- you! -- you cannot stand up when the seatbelt light is on!" There are a few men who won't turn off their electronic devices Aviation Safety Be Damned, two over-head televisions running washed-out Simpsons reruns; several babies wracked in high-volume pain; an in-flight service crew that looks wary and tired, uncertain for what they are being punished.

All of which is to say that something subtle/perceptible seems to change when your destination is Moscow, and that the world takes on a kind of imitative hue of Whatever You Imagine Moscow To Have Been Like Circa 1982, and that the can of Heineken delivered me (with surprising intensity) by the Crew Chief for BA Flight 8255 seemed like it meant a lot more to him than a can of Heineken usually does. When I woke we were already descending, but for his sake - and also because he had pretty well camped out next to my seat -- I drank it as quickly as I could(7).

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(1). A note on reportage: We left for Philadelphia on Saturday, July 16th at 2:30pm EST, we arrived at our hotel in Moscow at at 10:30am EST, we will be boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway on Tuesday, July 19th at approximately 1:00pm EST, we will be arriving in Mongolia for the first of a 5 day stay in Ulan Bator sometime in the morning of Saturday, 7.23; we will board a train for Beijing on 7.29; we will return to Lancaster on 8.1. In promising to the 1 or 2 other vaguely interested readers of mine that I would "blog" the trip, I do so acknowledging:
a. There will be limits on my capacity so to do, given the actualities of the trip, etc. etc and as such I'm going to do my best to hold myself to a 500ish word word count per entry(1.5) for the sake of sanity;
b. There will be limits on my capacity to post daily, or even bi-daily, depending on internet access etc. etc.;
c. There will be limits on my capacity to write cogently, cleverly, with any kind of grammatical/typographical integrity given a+b above and the fact that I'm writing this on an iPad which isn't, like, working-in-a-coal-mine-difficult but nonetheless something of a challenge. It occurred to me this afternoon that the likelihood of my coupe on the TSR having wifi = slim at best, and as such there may be an entire entry written on an iPhone. Again, not coal-mine-difficult, but also I have wide fingers?

(1.5) Re: 500 words. I once wrote a 2500 piece on Pennlive titled, "Collective Reasons My Life Is Better Now That The World Cup Is Over" that was solid work all-told and the only comment any commentator was able to muster was, "This is too long". If Too Long is my primary modus operandi, I can't imagine why 500 words is suddenly going to become a thing I can maintain (note: word count for this footnote = 77 words).

(2) He's British -- read as such.

(2.5) Re: the falling asleep thing. It certainly doesn't jibe with my whole "Afraid Of Flying" thing I'm working on here and as such it's possible that it either distracts from the narrative herein or sort of posits it as fictive. The gentleman was busy; time passed; I'm a notorious sleeper (see: me in cars; me on trains); it happened and it is what it is(2.85). I carry legally prescribed Xanax as anti-anxiety medication when flying, I take it, and sometimes it knocks me out and sometimes it doesn't seem to do much of anything. You might take this a step further and point out that I'm not only taking Xanax but also drinking alcohol which = just bad behavior and perhaps your right but the dose is low, one beer is one beer, and without both I white-knuckle and so.

(2.85) Yes, I know - you're that person who is all, "'It is what it is'? I mean, what does that even mean, right? Of course 'it is what it is,! What else would 'it' be?" and to you I say, "Clever, you"(2.86).

(2.86). That being said, I read a lot of language log (see: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) and if you don't you ought to as well and it has made me do a thing where I sort of hide behind any and all grammatical/punctuative foibles as okay-by-means-of-"usage" and in all probability your complaining about my use of reasonably meaningless phraseology is more valid than my constant attempt to hide behind them.

(3) It's probably best to re-enact every conversation I've had about traveling the TSR:
Other Person: [Said with extraordinary disinterest] Any big plans this summer? Taking any trips?
Me: Well, I'm thinking about going to Russia and Riding the Trans-Siberian Railway?
Other Person: Why?
Me: Well, it's...like, old? And covers something like 20% of the circumference of the Earth? And you just sort of sit there for 5 days?
Other Person: That sounds awful.
Uncomfortable silence.

(3.10) I'm weirdly dishonest about why I got this thing in my head - earlier-blog-entries-inclusive. About 18 months ago I read an absolutely awful book called "The Ridiculous Race" - a non-fiction high-concept travel book - wherein two sit-com writers challenge each other to race around the world in opposite directions. The only rule - no airplanes allowed; the bet - one shot of whiskey sitting on a kitchen table to be downed by the first one back. Anyway, everything about the idea of the book thrills me - even writing it here it sounds great - but it reads like two guys who are used to writing Jokes For The Laughtrack Machine and it relies more on zaniness than anything else and so. All that being said, there's an 8ish pages section on the Trans-Siberian Railway and when I read it something fundamental happened and now here we are.

(4) I mean this comparative to other flights not to, like, anything else.

(5) Though the gentleman to my left was about seven feet tall and insistent on sharing most of my seat with me.

(6) Apologies for the differentiation, gingers.

(7). Which isn't particularly quickly because I drink beer like a "total sissy" (quote attributed to: "Any Person With Whom I Have Shared A Beer, Family Inclusive").