Hello Moscow, here we are! At 9 pm we checked in at the hotel. Pretty tired now. Everything went smoothly… Well, besides the moment we almost missed our plane. (Whoops!) At the actual moment, we didn’t notice it, so luckily there was no stress at all. Come to think of it…we were at the airport so very early and even had lunch for a long time. We checked in and we thought we had to be at the gate at 2 pm. Apparently we had to board at 2 pm and the distance between the gate and boarding area will normally take an hour for ‘normal’ people (without a wheelchair). Thanks to my great wheelchair I was racing over the airport and could skip lines so it ‘only’ took us 35 minutes. In short, on the plane the people were pretty nervous and yelling ‘if I was that last passenger they were waiting for’. Normally, disabled people can enter the plane first instead of being the past person. Whoopsie!! So actually, we were quite lucky and almost missed our flight, despite being at the airport so early.
Besides this thing happening, everything went great. The flight went fine, I could go to the door of the airplane with my own wheelchair and (even though it was not necessary), I was taken out of the plane with a lift and escorted to the luggage hall with a separate van. Our suitcases were almost the first to come off the plane and immediately at the exit of the arrival gate, there was a gentleman who was holding up a sign with my name on it. With an extremely luxurious taxi we drove to the hotel in an hour. The Russians are driving really fast in Moscow! And surprisingly, at 8 pm there is still a traffic jam on a 5-lane highway. The cars have some sort of cabinets behind the window so they can keep on driving at the toll booths, and at the traffic lights they indicate in seconds when the light turns green so that they can immediately take off again. It is a pity that it is dark and that we cannot see much of the city yet, but the first impression is that indeed we have arrived in a metropolis.
We are staying at Hotel Vega, part of a hotel group “Izmailovo”, containing 5 hotels that were built as an Olympic village for the 80s Olympic Games. Tomorrow morning in daylight we will see it a bit better. 🙂 Our driver has brought us in nicely and escorted us to the VIP check-in. And now…. relaxing in our hotel room on the 26th (!) Floor.
Take care!!!
