On the Way to DC, or Six Long Hours

We are 12. A symbolic number. I’m tempted to write that we have come from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, and from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan. It’s almost true. We are from Astrakhan, Blagoveshchensk, Elista, Kaliningrad, Kolomna, Moscow, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Vladivostok, Yakutsk, and Yekaterinburg. We arrived at the airport early in the morning only to realize that we were to wait yet for another 6 hours because of fog in Moscow. After 3 hours of wait, passengers of the 2 flights – to Atlanta and NY – grew restless and asked representatives of the Delta Airlines for food, according to the existing rules. As we were on the airside already, we had to leave the area every time we needed restroms or wanted food or drink. Every time we returned to the area splendidly called nakopitel in Russian – nah-caw-‘pee-tell, which could be translated either as a “container” or a “cattle-pen” – we had to take off our boots, and coats, and belts, and be frisked.

Once in a while, a uniformed official would come into the area looking for stranded passengers. “Is there anyone here heading for Venice?”, she would shout. She looked distressed. To console her, we nearly flew to Venice, but on second thought decided not to. We could not let down Department of State or American taxpayers.

Delta Airlines representative Mr Nickolai, who was protective of his family memebers and would not give out his surname, explained again and again that the company does not feed their passengers should the flight be postponed because of weather conditions. Passengers, some of them tired and emotional, pointed out that all other airlines were feeding their customers or had already done so – Air France, and Aeroflot, and Swiss Airlines, and China Airlines, and Lesotho Airlines, and fill-in-the-blank airlines – but Nickolai would not budge.

A big American guy who was heading for Atlanta and obviosly understood some Russian listened to a heated Q&A for a while and then explained to his fellow-sufferers: “Russians want food or any other compensation for the long wait. Compensation for inconvenience… Compensation from Delta – NOT!!! (You know “not” jokes?) And they shared a good laugh. Did they know something about the Delta Airlines that we Russians were missing? Or were they just happy to be homeward bound and couldn’t care less about how to spend their last morning, lunchtime, afternoon, and possibly night, in Russia? I don’t know.

Six long hours are behind us now. We are on board and flying somewhere across North Europe. We are fed and happy. Enough writing for today. I have more important things to do now. A Walt Disney movie is beginning.