Traveling Without Moving

The world is shaping up to be a very strange place. At the end of a very long trip last week, I had a stark reminder of exactly how small it has become.

I flew back to the United States for the holidays on the 22nd, which turned into one of the longer days of my life. A three-day snow shower settled over Moscow, which prompted my colleague Josh and me to head out to the airport earlier than we had intended just to be on the safe side. Once there, we discovered that the flight was already delayed well before its take off time. In airport terms, that’s preparation for even longer delays.

We were right. The delay kept creeping on in small increments. In the hallway near all the perfume shops I bumped into an American friend, and together the three of us headed off to the airport’s Irish bar to kill some time. Sitting at a table across from an impressive array of taps, we all silently assessed the situation. Then I tried to sum up my fears – “I don’t want to miss the holidays with my family because I inadvertently had way too much to drink in an airport bar in Moscow.” We all laughed a little, safe in the collective decision that we didn’t have to drink alcohol simply because of our location.

We were there for a long time, and got kind of rambunctious anyway. We drank strong coffee which we bought each other by the rounds. The tally was somewhere around 5 to 6 cups of coffee before we headed to the plane.

The flight was as uneventful as long stretches of boredom interspersed with sleep can be.

After all that time in the air and a quick glimpse of New York City at night, I felt as though I had slipped out of one reality and entered another – a la Billy Pilgrim. But after I collected my luggage, that illusion all came crashing down.

The strike was still on at that point, so I piled into a cab with some Norwegian tourists to share a ride into Manhattan. Russian-style, I sat in the front seat. In Moscow, the standard behavior is to sit next to the driver when riding in a cab.

As we pulled out, I heard the driver mutter under his breath a little. Something familiar. “Are you Russian?” I asked.

“Ahhhh,” he said, “We are you from?”
“I only just flew in from Moscow to see my family,” I answered.

So we chatted (all in Russian) for a while - and then for a while a longer. Thanks to the strike-induced traffic jam, our trip into the city took over 2 hours. I heard about life in Tashkent, how the taxi stands at JFK work, reminisced a little about Moscow, and generally shot the breeze with “Misha” all the way into the city.

It was fun, informative, and interesting to see a side of the Russian diaspora in New York. I'm quite sure the Norwegians in the back seat thought we were about to rob them, strip them naked, and leave them standing along side the Van Wyck Expressway but in truth we weren't paying them much attention.

After 10 hours at breakneck speed through the stratosphere, I was home again and feeling as if I had never left Moscow at all. Call it the global village, call it the interconnectedness of the world’s major urban centers, call it what you will. But sometimes the whole world feels like it’s shifting under your feet, racing around to catch up with where you’re going.