Our flight out of Moscow wasn’t until 7:15 pm that day, but since it was on Aeroflot airlines, we didn’t want to take any chances. Whenever we take a trip we check prices on different airlines, and Aeroflot is always the absolute cheapest, so I was a little leery of using them. We had originally booked the flight on Cathay Pacific, but since they abruptly stopped service to Russia, they rebooked us on the Aeroflot flight to get us to Hong Kong.
Kuniko was still feeling like crap in the morning, so we decided to stay in bed as long as possible. Check out wasn’t until noon and while Kuniko rested I did the packing and got all our travel goodies charged up and ready to go. We had arranged for a taxi to pick us up at the hotel and drive us to the airport at around 2 pm, so we had two hours to kill after checkout. We decided to go have some lunch at a cafe right on Red Square, and take one last look at St. Basil’s Cathedral before we left.
The cafe was pretty nice, pretty touristy, and pretty expensive. They did have a menu that included “traditional Russian foods”, but most of what they served was quesadillas, pasta and salads. Kuniko went with the borscht, and I had chicken Kiev. The food was much better than we expected, though, and I washed everything down with a beer. It was nice to spend one last meal here before we faced the trays of airplane food later on.
Our taxi driver arrived a little bit late – just enough to give us a scare – but we said goodbye to the hotel staff and then settled into the cab. The driver didn’t speak any English, but since I had already arranged everything (including payment) online, it was a quiet ride. There was considerably more traffic on the way to the airport than when we had arrived, and I was happy that we had allowed plenty of time to make our flight. The driver hadn’t discovered the wonders of deodorant, however, so that was a bit unpleasant.
At the airport we had some time to kill. There were some interesting vending machines there – one sold orange juice, and another sold Putin T-shirts and cellphone cases. I think the main target was tourists, but everything was written in Russian so who knows?
There really wasn’t any place to sit at the airport while we waited to check-in. There were a lot of people waiting and they had already taken all the seats. We wanted to rest up though, so we grabbed a table at TGI Friday’s – I never expected to find one at a Moscow airport. I had a beer and Kuniko had some hot chocolate to settle her stomach, and after people watching for the better part of an hour we were able to head to the check-in counter.
From there everything went pretty smoothly. When I asked if our luggage could be checked through to Osaka so we wouldn’t have to deal with it in Hong Kong, our ticketing agent responded with “maybe”. I laughed out loud and she smiled a little – maybe the first smile from a Russian service worker during our trip. Luckily the suitcase was able to be checked through, and it made it safely to Osaka when we did.
The Aeroflot flight was very smooth, and the service was quite good. Kuniko had heard that the food was really good on Aeroflot, but unfortunately we found that at least for us, it sucked pretty badly. There were plenty of good movies on the entertainment system, though and I managed to finish a book and even get a little bit of sleep.
In Hong Kong we had a tight connection that we were worried about – only an hour and a half to change from Aeroflot to Cathay Pacific. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. There was a big thunderstorm in the area, and the whole airport was running behind schedule. Our flight out initially was assigned a gate, but later they decided to delay our flight three hours, so we had lots of time to kill. Since we were in Hong Kong we went to the restaurants in the airport and try some Chinese food. The competition for empty tables was brutal – we weren’t the only flight delayed – but Kuniko managed to get a couple of seats and we ate some dumpling soup with noodles, and spare ribs wrapping in rice cake with soy sauce that was really tasty.
Finally we got the call to the gate, and our Cathay Pacific flight took off smoothly. It was just three and a half hours to Osaka, and it was good to be back. We took the ferry back to Kobe, and I even saw one of my current students returning from a trip to Hokkaido. We were pretty tired after we got home, but we eventually went to bed at around midnight. Luckily we set aside Sunday as a recovery day, and as it turned out later – we would need it.
