Coffee, IBM, Gazprom, Shipping and Traffic…

The weather outside is just plain nasty and that cup of coffee is just plain good this morning. So while I was sipping that wonderful coffee. I was doing some thinking’s…

I was thinking about several things and least of which is not that Sveta has flown out early this morning from Moscow and headed to Belgium. Sveta who is an IBM AS/400 or iSeries computer specialist has a MIMIX 7, brain crushing week ahead…

So Boza and I have the flat to ourselves for a whole week and we are going to try real hard not to get in trouble… 🙂 (I said try!)

When I met Sveta I knew she was into computers but I had know idea that she was a software/programmer specialist and to top that off she is the IBM Server Specialist for the Gazprombank in Russia. Gazprombank is (in Russian: Газпромбанк) is the largest Russian non-state owned bank, which is among the three largest banks in Russia…

I am very proud of her…

Next on the thinking list was the traffic in Moscow!

Yesterday Sveta and I ran some errands. We had to go to the car market for some parts, mail a package to America, go to the shopping mall, go to Svet’s mothers and go to a movie…

Now that seems to be a reasonable list of things to do. It was Saturday and we had all day to do it. Up early and on the road was the plan and get home to go to the movies. Oops – It did not happen! We accomplished the first two items and that was all accomplished in about 13 hours. By the time we finally made it home, the movie was vetoed by us both…

Sometimes trying to drive through Moscow is on the verge of being akin to driving through a landmine field in a Volkswagen beetle. Just ain’t gonna happen and if you try it. You will be in bad shape…

We started out going to the auto parts market. It took us 1 ½ hours to get 5 km to the market. We were at the market itself about 5 minutes.

Now starts the hell:

Then we had to drive into the Moscow center and go to a UPS to mail a box of goodies for a person in America…

After watching and passing no less than a dozen wrecks and another dozen broken down trucks, we succeeded in reaching the nearest Mail Boxes Etc. shipping places. We had erased 7 ½ hours of our day already… 🙁

After 1½ hours to get a package packed and shipped. We started home. 4 hours later we found a parking space (miracles do happen) and collapsed in our flat. To be fair though the drive home was much better than the drive to the center of Moscow and we stopped at McDonald’s and had some of those great Fish Wraps that they have now… 🙂 (Only 3 wrecks on the way home to look at!)

So you may consider that yesterday was a failure? Not so! Sveta and I consider it an adventure. The one thing about Russia is, that nothing is easy and smooth. If it was, it would not be Russia. I really think that Murphy’s Law was founded in Russia… (No it was not. The first form of Murphy’s law goes back as far as 1877 out of Britain it seems… )

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”

That is why I love Russia and never wish for it to be any other way…

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