Yall is crazy, I am OUTTA here!

I guess now is a good a time as any to write up a blog. Wow a lot has happened in the last ten days or so. Lets se. last we spoke I was in Yaroslavl getting ready to take some time in Europe while I waited for my club to find some money to pay me with. And I guess that’s were it got interesting.

So last Friday I drove to Moscow to hit the airport and head to Berlin for a few days. I had made the drive to Moscow from Yaroslavl without anything going wrong, and that was a big deal in itself, so I shoulda known things were going all to well.

I checked in for my flight and headed to customs. Seeing my plane on the tarmac outside the windows gave me an overwhelming feeling that I was free and clear of Russia for at least a week, but in the next few minutes’ things started to suck… real bad.

Excuse me sir, where is your visa?
Why its right there, is it now?
Sir this is a photocopy of a visa.
I see…. Its what I’ve been using to travel around Russia with my team, I didn’t think there would be a problem?
Yes, is small problem.
K….so?
Come with me Mr. Soneeas

Of course I had a photocopy of my visa and not the real one?? Why would I have my real visa with me, that’s just crazy talk! Jeeez. Anyways, I was taken into some room and it was explained to me that I could not leave the country without my visa, so I was instructed to go to several different desks throughout the airport to cancel my flight, get my bags off the plane, and call the Russian embassy (who I might add could have solved the problem in a jiffy but chose to make things difficult as usual) to authorize or issue something or other. After running around the airport tired and frustrated for a few hours, I managed to delay my flight to Berlin for 3 days which would give my club a few hundred kilometers away the needed time to send me the original visa.
Ok fine, I guess I’ll stay in Moscow for the weekend. I guess there could be worse things. But I did miss my man Dodd’s game in Berlin, and he was waiting at the airport for me for quite some time from what I understand. As it turns out Moscow is the most expensive city on the globe. I found this out real quickly as I found the cheapest shadiest gypsy cab to drive me from the airport to the city…. For $60. Needless to say, I didn’t receive $60 worth of service. But at least I reached a hotel; which was quite nice really, and it was a reasonable $275 a night… Wait did I just say that? Ya, I guess I did. Remember Moscow is nutzo expensive.
So over the next two days I kept myself busy with eating and wondering around downtown Moscow (only a $140 cab ride away). I saw the Kremlin, red square, St. basils cathedral Lenin’s mausoleum. Which were all intense in their own right. Mostly I’d like to go into explaining my experience at Lenin’s mausoleum, but it wouldn’t do it justice, and I might end up a political prisoner. And the whole weekend I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going to happen when I reached that customs desk.
So that was my time in Moscow. Very very expensive, but interesting. Probably won’t go again so I’m glad I did. And then it was the day to leave the motherland.
600am up showered and fed by 630am
630am Taxi to some downtown train station to meet the team driver to get what I hope is the necessary papers to leave the country.
700am Randomly see the Team Bus parked on the side of a road nowhere near our original designated meeting point, so I jump out of the cab and flag down the driver. I get the papers, boom, done.
701am I have some time to burn, so this is when go to Red Square and tourist it up. Its weird to stand in red square and think of all the things that have happened there in the last thousand years; And its eerie in the main chapel of st. basil’s cathedral knowing Ivan the Terrible was kneeling were your standing hundreds of years ago smashing his head on the ground, begging forgiveness for all the straight messed up things he did on the daily.
1100am Take another cheap taxi right to the hotel to pack up and head to the airport for round two
1220pm leave for the airport. (slight delay due to the hotel shuttle driver deciding to pick up some random people on the side of the road to make an extra buck)
100pm get to the airport a bit rattled. Wondering if its going to work and their gonna let me leave. My flight is at 5 but I’m there crazy early so if something goes wrong I can argue and try find a solution.
207pm I’m in the line for customs. I can feel the tension tightening my whole body. I can feel my forehead start to sweat ever so slightly which in turn makes me sweat more. I try to keep my cool and be unsuspicious. I get to the front of the line and I hand the passport officer my papers. It’s a young woman so I try to flash her a smile and say something that will divert her attention from my documents like “….ciao” . She’s not having it. Not one bit. I feel like a kid again. And I’m in the principals office waiting for him to come in and tell me how long I’m suspended for. Basically helpless to help my situation, which is something I hate. And them BANG BANG. She stamps my passport and opens the gate. I’m stunned for half a second then scram. I walk at a pace fast enough to make me look awkward; I gotta get away before they call me back.
208pm I’m through. Ecstatic fireworks of joy are going off in my mind that I can’t display openly for fear of being found out. So I just smile…. Rather foolishly.
500pm I get on the flight and everything runs smoothly (I learn that in both Russian AND German newspapers, it is ok to have bare boosum'd women), and Dodds picks me up in Berlin at the airport. At this point my unplanned European holiday starts. And if you’ve made it this far, I think this is quite enough reading for one day.

So I had gotten some curve balls and my trip hadn’t even started really. Call it
Phase one. Phase one complete. And honestly, I’m in the clear, what else could go Wrong.