City club and Istanbul.

I forgot to mention that we had another city club meeting on Thursday night. This is the group that comes together to speak English. I met som3 more nice people, including Adil from Copenhagen. And several of us got into a discussion of cycling after I mentioned that I would be in Moscow this weekend for the Winter Cycling Conference.A Russian woman was saying she thought there would not be a lot of support for Cycling from the older generations here because people of her parents’ generation were deprived of material goods for so long under the Soviet system, now they want to show what they can purchase. Bikes would not be a first choice for them. Makes sense. But I know several of my younger colleagues like to cycle so Thang’s are changing slowly here as they are everywhere. Advil and I will be meeting later to talk about life in Russia. Onday after work I went over to Sonia’s and Fouad came over later. We booked our entire spring vacation. We are going to fly south in Russia to Krasnodar for two days. After that, we will take the overnight train to Sochi and spend another two days on the Black Sea. Then from Sochi we will fly to Istanbul for 4 days. None of us has been there. We will see all the touristy things then Sonia and I will fly back to Kazan and Fouad will fly on to Beirut because he hasn’t been home in awhile. It will be another a tie vacation. Yesterday afternoon I got really frustrated. The guy from school was trying to help me print out my boarding pass and it wasn’t working at all. He even called the airline and their suggestion was to try another browser. After 3 or 4 tries, we gave up. But w3 did orde& a taxi for 4 a.m. This time we ordered something besides Uber because that always gets screwed up. We called my hotel and corrected the check in time. It was just such a long and tedious process and I kept worrying if this taxi deal would screw up too, because at 4 a.m. there wasn’t going to be anyone around to help me! But both Sonia and the guy from work said I should call them if it didn’t show up. Nice people. So this morning it was rise and shine at 3:15 a.m. and at 3:50 I got the call that the taxi was waiting. He was a nice guy who spoke very good English and drove carefully on The snow-covered roads. Did I mention that it was snowing again, too? He was really interesting because he said he was a volunteer for Navalny, Putin’s opponent in the coming elections. Put in has not been making Navslny’s life easy and I bet if this taxi driver I sent careful, there might be consequences for him, too. At the airport I had a croissant that. Ishtar have been left over from the French Revolution, and a bottle of water. I flew with Utair, a local airline, and it was a great flight. I slept the whole way. It was amazing to the piles of snow on the runway at Moscow. The were really bombarded this weekend. In fact, there’s a car near my hostel here that’s buried under drifts at the side of the road. I’ll try to get a picture of it tomorrow morning. But, I. Any case, I took the train in from the airport and caught the metro in the direction I needed to go. Keep in mind, I googled all these directions before I left so I’d have an idea of what I was doing. Since you can’t pay cash on the buses in Moscow, I got a troika card which allows we to us tram, bus and metro at a discount price. And you can keep reloading the card. And when you get on the bus in Moscow, you got on in the front, swipe you card and then go through a turnstile on the bus. So if there are a lot of people, it takes ages and the people still outside in the cold scream for the others to hurry up. When I went down into the subway there was an information lady who Checked the route to the hotel again for me. so I knew where I was transferring and where I was headed. When I got off the bus I knew I had to walk to the left. When I asked several ladies just to ch3ck. , they all said I had to go right. Hmmm. I tried their way and of course it was wrong. I finally to a tram back to where I though5 it was and, low and behold, another lady helped me find it off the Main Street in a courtyard. It’s really a nice place. It’s very clean an modern-looking. They even have room service from their own restaurant at no extra cost and WiFi. And the girl at the desk spent a lot of time helping we find the right directions to the conference center. I have a nice room to myself with a tv. The bathrooms’s across the hall of course. By the time that I got to the hostel, called Mother Russia, by the way, it was noon and I was starving. So I figured I would go check out where the conference venue is and grab something to eat. It turns out the tram is an easy tram/metro ride away. And at the transfer point I found a KFC, a grocery store and a French pastry shop. Unfortunately, on the return trip, I first got on the metro in the wrong dir3ction. When I discovered my error, I got off at the next stop and jumped in the metro headed in the other direction. This time at the transfer point I took the time to eat something at KFC but figured I would wait until tomorrow for a chocolate eclair. I ran into the store and got a bottle of water and some cookies. Now I’m already in for the night and am Going to turn in soon. I have to be up early for the conference tomorrow.