Chapter 11: A Summer in Siberia: South Ossetia, A Heavenly Wedding and a Flight from Hell

Escaping the Rat Race again

After finishing my studies in Glasgow I worked for a month on minimum wage hanging up car keys as a temp worker on a former US air base in Cambridgeshire. The best part of the job was the opportunity to speak a bit of Russian with the Poles and Bulgarians who spent the days industriously valeting cars there.

My fruitless applications for jobs in international development continued apace but eventually I had to return to life as a computer programmer, working for a former employer in Berkshire.

After a few reasonable, if ultimately unfulfilling months back in the UK rat race, I approached my boss to ask if I could follow the example of a colleague who was intending to work from Cyprus. She responded enthusiastically to my ambition to be her small firm's first Siberian office, immediately seeing benefit in my working in support of the computer systems whilst Britain slept: any customers facing overnight problems could simply contact me rather than waking her up. She also accepted my assurances that the internet's tentacles had indeed reached Chita, though I did warn her that Siberian service providers were usually powered by a babushka pedalling a push-bike rather than by high-speed broadband.

Siberia: Infinitely preferable to the Home Counties

In June 2008 I touched down in a Chita still home to Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky and, despite my visa being in perfect order, was again refused registration in the city. My friend Sayana and I staged a fictitious wedding ceremony in a café, Martin acting as priest and using a napkin ring to do the honours, since a 'Russian bride' would have provided me with a quick resolution to my visa hassles. Several visits to the Federal Migration 'Service' and letters from the British agency through which I had arranged my visa eventually yielded a tacit admission that the FMS had just been making up their own rules again, and I was registered to live with ever-hospitable Inna and family until the end of August.

Finding an internet connection proved every bit as difficult as I had feared- even some of the internet cafés dotted across Chita had no web connection (fronts for criminal activity, perhaps?). Wireless internet, by 2008 ubiquitous in the UK, was unheard of in Siberia. The solution came in the shape of Chita's sole long-term Australian resident, Martin, who was leaving his old flat in the distant suburb of KSK to move into a central flat bought cheap from a couple of raging alcoholics and fumigated before extensive renovation. His old flat stood empty but had an often functional 256k internet connection, so I rented the flat as an office throughout the working week.

My 'office' was located in KSK, a district on the edge of Chita constructed specifically for the workers of a giant beast of a textiles factory which shut down during perestroika, rendering the local population jobless and bringing immediate deprivation to the several thousand local inhabitants. Things have improved since those dark days of the early 1990s, but KSK remains one of the poorer suburbs of Chita, the abandoned factory with its slogans to the glory of labour a brooding, decaying presence which even today is still sometimes stripped of its few remaining saleable components by optimistic scavengers.

My daily commute from Inna's flat to my 'office' took around 45 minutes in a marshrutka taxi-bus, and the irony of escaping the Berkshire commute only to land squarely in Siberia's own rush hour rat race did not escape me. Even despite the crazy Russian driving, it was a comfort not to have to take the wheel myself to wrestle through crowds of Home Counties school mums in 4x4s.

As ever, evenings were spent in the easy, welcoming company of Inna's family or with friends drinking beer at outdoor summer cafés. I did not miss life in the UK (family and dog aside) whereas my time in Britain is usually spent periodically longing to return to Siberia. Inna's husband Artur was good company, as usual, tolerating my poor Russian and telling me daft (and apparently true) tales such as how, during the Soviet period, people would name their daughters 'Elektrifikatsia' in honour of Stalin's electrification programme, 'Vladlena' in memory of Vladimir Lenin, or even 'Dazdraperma' , which translates as 'Congratulations on the First of May'. May Day was a major communist holiday.

In mid-2008 Chita was in the grip of a speculative property boom. All over the city Chinese builders laboured every daylight hour to throw up new blocks which looked modern from a distance but were decidedly shabby inside. One new district was even optimistically monikered 'Olympic Village', presumably in anticipation of a future Chita bid to host the Summer Olympics. Meanwhile the growing Russian middle class, grabbing a share of the explosion in credit- mortgages being an entirely novel innovation- could not snap up flats quickly enough as they saw prices rise and sensed a quick buck to be made. At one point Martin and I, baffled that a one-room flat could cost thirty to forty thousand pounds in a city where average earnings were still around £250 per month, calculated the ratio of income to property prices. We estimated that in his home town of Adelaide, such a flat would cost 30 times a person's monthly wage. The same figure was around 50 in Chesterfield, England- this at the height of a UK boom- and for Chita, 133. Quite simply, an investment bubble was enveloping the city, fuelled by unprecedented availability of credit and good, old-fashioned speculation. Martin found this particularly unsettling and half-heartedly drew up plans to live self-sufficiently on a farm in America after Chita's inevitable economic meltdown.

June 2008 saw football's European Championships, with matches played in the dead of night by Siberian time. Nonetheless, as the Russian national team recovered from an inauspicious start and progressed to the final, football mania gripped Chita a way I had witnessed in England during the very occasional tournament in which our own national team did not disgrace itself. Bars opened at 4am to accommodate swathes of flag-waving fanatics, and cars sped around the city, Russian tricolours fluttering and horns blaring, after each early-morning victory. During one match I had made my first ever trip to Lake Baikal- it rained heavily and the most memorable moment was when a teenage Buryat girl viciously and suddenly headbutted a teenage Russian girl in the street- but at 6am one of our party was awoken by a call from her Buryat husband. “We beat the Dutch!” he screamed joyously. Groggily she shared his joy, as did the bar from which he was calling, or so the riotous cries of early-morning delight suggested. Russia lost to Spain in the final of Euro 2008, but the national team's performance added to a resurgence of national pride which was soon to be furthered by two more dramatic events: the Beijing Olympics and the conflict in South Ossetia.

South Ossetia: A question of perspective

On 8^th July 2008, with world attention diverted by the Olympics' opening ceremony in Beijing, Georgian forces attempted to forcibly bring under control the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Russia, on the pretext of protecting ethnically-Russian South Ossetian citizens to whom she had given Russian passports, responded with massive force. Russian TV news, state-controlled as ever, immediately filled with images of citizens of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, thanking Mother Russia for her swift action in protecting them against aggression from Georgia (of which, in the eyes of the UN, South Ossetia was a constituent part- a fact I never heard mentioned on Russian TV). In search of a differing perspective, I read the online BBC coverage of the conflict, only to find ill-informed portraits of Russia as frozen in Cold War aggression, eager to flex its military muscles against its upstart neighbour. Then-UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband's proclamation that Russia had started the war and must face the consequences of its “blatant aggression”¹ betrayed a total lack of willingness even to try to understand the situation in South Ossetia and destroyed any respect I may have had for him as a politician. Tory leader David Cameron also declared unconditional support for Georgia², but I had never had any respect for him in the first place. I spoke to my Grandad via Skype during the conflict (the technology amazed him- “Like I was in the next room”, he said) and he was genuinely alarmed by the Cold War, 'We-Will-Nuke-Everyone' rhetoric of Russia's army chiefs quoted in the Western media³. The BBC appeared to have taken the same view, disregarding the more diplomatic noises coming from the Kremlin. The Russian military may well still view the world as if Brezhnev was still the boss and long to engage in any action which may justify its continued, bloated leaching of so much of the Motherland's resources. However the country's politicians, for all their faults, don't usually take quite such a simplistic line. As ever, the truth lay somewhere between the BBC coverage and that of Russian TV. Russia's reaction to an initial act of Georgian aggression was surely excessive and contrary to international law, but understandable as the Bush administration seemed to be pursuing a policy of NATO expansion which threatened to encircle Russia's entire Western borderlands via influence over lands formerly controlled from Moscow. Western criticism of Russia's recognition of South Ossetia as a sovereign state was hypocritical in the wake of Western governments' own recognition of Kosovan independence earlier that year and Russian criticism of Georgia clearly ignored the parallels to Russia's aggressive policy in its own breakaway republic of Chechnya. Meanwhile, as relations between Moscow and London cooled rapidly, people in Chita often asked my view on the conflict, and were surprised to hear that I had not swallowed the official Western perspective as wholly as they had usually swallowed the Russian state media's view. Indeed a few, buoyed by an aggressive diplomacy not seen since the Cold War, would tell me, “We won Eurovision⁴, we did really well in Euro 2000 and the Olympics, we have oil and now we have won a war”. Thankfully, the conflict soon ended and though relations between the UK and Russia are still not on the warmest of footings, some Western officials do seem to have at least acknowledged that Georgia fired the first shots⁵ and that Georgian President Saakashvili, though he speaks fluent English, may not be such a wonderful chap after all. Would it be too much to hope that the Russian military may become PR-savvy and in future prevent their top brass appearing on TV, threatening to nuke everyone?

A Buryat/Russian/Uzbek wedding

July 2008 saw the wedding of my half-Russian, half-Buryat friend Sasha to her Uzbek fiancé Shukrat. Sasha had sent me a speculative email inviting me to the celebration many months before, when I was still in the daily Berkshire grind, and I was delighted to be able to surprise her with a 'yes'. The wedding was to happen in many stages- a 'bride's wedding party' in Sasha's home town of Aginsk⁶, followed by the registration of their marriage at Chita's registry office. After this twenty or so of the guests would re-convene for a few days' celebratory camping in a nearby national park, after which the happy couple would travel to Uzbekistan for the 'groom's wedding', with the celebration to end with a week's tour of that fine country. This arrangement was apparently unusual and differed from the usual Orthodox or secular Russian two-day celebration, owing to the difficulties of shipping guests from Uzbekistan to Siberia and to the fact that Sasha was nominally Buddhist and Shukrat nominally Muslim.

On the first day of festivities, Sasha was preparing at home in Aginsk, a hundred miles or so to the south of Chita on the steppeland which reaches down into Mongolia. Martin and I joined Shukrat and two of his male friends Slava and Serge, and we crammed into a white Toyota (ubiquitous in Chita) to bomb down the almost-metalled road to Aginsk. Serge, friendly but mischievous, asked me if I was a spy. I replied with my usual “Yes, and I phone Gordon Brown every evening to tell him what has been happening in Chita because it is such an important town”. We discussed my 'spying' activities, tongues firmly in cheeks, a fair few times over the next few days. A few miles short of Aginsk we roared to a halt in a lay-by and disembarked to tie wedding ribbons to the front of the car. We then drove to Sasha's flat, horns loudly blaring in the Russian wedding-celebration style. This is a common sight every Friday and Saturday in Chita as newly-weds visit the city's monuments, and whilst the uptight British prude in me views such behaviour as somehow primitive, when I think about it I realise that driving around in beribboned cars with horns sounding relentlessly is nothing more than an expression of joy and as such not something I have any right to turn my nose up at. The mixture of traditions, Buryat, Russian and Uzbek, was evident as we entered Sasha's flat (me in an Uzbek hat kindly presented by Shukrat) to find a large group of her Buryat girlfriends ready to play the Russian game whereby the groom must 'buy' his bride. This involves various inventive games, the object of which seems to be to make the groom look mildly silly whilst emptying his pockets of cash. Shukrat, an undemonstrative type, took it in very good humour and turned down the mock advances of several of the female guests with a “No- is there a better girl than her?” He eventually negotiated the tasks set by the giggling girls, culminating in his being allowed to see his bride. Sasha stepped from her room, radiant in white, and off we all went for a quick drive around Aginsk before settling at a local hotel where a multitude of guests had already gathered. The number of guests at a normal Russian wedding is probably comparable to that in the UK but Buryat tradition demands a bigger gathering and around 250 people had gathered for what was a joyous meal, punctuated by announcements from the energetic 'tamada' (toast master), heartfelt toasts, more silly games, plenty of singing from various groups and individuals, and to back it all, a keyboard player whose cheesy style and regular drum-rolls added a comical and warm touch. Early on in the meal I was asked to say a toast, which I duly did in Russian without messing it up too badly, and was then asked to sing a song. Being English and having grown up in a culture which represses such spontaneous self-expression, I shyly mumbled “Maybe later”, all the time thinking that there was no way I was going to oblige. After a few more toasts I gathered a group of willing accomplices, scribbled down what I could remember of The Beatles' 'Yesterday' (a song much loved in Russia) and we belted out a tuneless rendition which the wedding guests seemed to appreciate greatly. The older Buryats were genuinely welcoming and after a few hours of enjoyable revelry we young'uns took off with the bride and groom for an evening of drinking at another Aginsk hotel. Next thing I knew, I was waking on the settee of a Buryat girl I had never met before, her having kindly volunteered her house as a crash pad for the many guests who had not thought ahead far enough to book a place to sleep.

Martin and I took a bus back to Chita, washed, gathered a few things and joined the car convoy to Alkhanai National Park, an almost-untouched area sacred to Buryat culture down near the Mongolian border. I sat next to a silent but amiable woman and only realised after half an hour on the road that she was breast-feeding a newly-born baby. We raced down paved roads to the Buryat village of Duldurga, some ten kilometres or so from the National Park's entrance, then rumbled a few miles along a dirt road to a checkpoint where some languid militia-types were charging people for admission to the park. Martin and I were told by our drivers to keep quiet as we would have been charged significantly more had our non-Russianness been revealed. The officials were in no hurry and our convoy was halted for fifteen minutes or so for no apparent reason; after all, we were just paying a toll. Russians often just shrug in the face of such pointless bureaucratic hold-ups: perhaps I am spoiled by what I now recognise as the efficiency of Western bureaucracy. I held my tongue. Eventually, on we moved past Buryat Buddhist monuments fluttering with prayer flags, stopping at one ourselves to walk reverentially around a large white stupa clockwise, an odd number of times. Buddhist tradition dictates that one must perform acts of tribute or worship once, twice, three times etc but that one should never do so an even number of times.

Alkhanai National Park shared the natural summer beauty of much of the Transbaikal wilderness, our small wooden huts- fairly recently and decently constructed- standing an area of thick taiga forest. There was no running water and the toilets were beneath description- something Russians tolerate as being 'close to nature' but a factor which would cause any discerning foreigner to flee in disgust. Even so, the huts were comfortable and our group well versed in dishing up tasty camp-fire meals, including one Uzbek chap who made a supreme plov dish of rice, mutton, carrot,garlic and cumin over an open fire.

We spent two enjoyable days dunking ourselves in pristine mountain streams and hiking. The dunking involved lying under the fast-flowing, very cold water on a supporting scaffold of four wooden poles for a minimum of twenty seconds per time, this to be performed an odd number of times. “Get your chest under- it's good for your heart!” people would cry as I lay gasping, half-submerged, like a pale, floundering fish. The hiking involved a long walk to the upper slopes of Mount Alkhanai, apparently Buddhism's fifth-most sacred site. There stands a stunning natural arch of rock some ten metres or so high, below which stands a large white stupa. Here on the shoulders of the holy mountain we overlooked a heavily wooded and apparently untouched vista of Siberian summer-time beauty. One of the devoted Buryat pilgrims leading his family clockwise around the stupa was wearing a Chelsea shirt, illustrating how English football (and its marketing machine) is currently riding the foremost waves of the torrent of globalisation. Just above the arch is a thin rock passage, the traversing of which is said to cleanse the soul of sin. I squeezed through easily enough- the passage was presumably ready to forgive all except those whose sin was to have eaten far too many pies. I presume American tourists have not yet discovered Mount Alkhanai.

As we followed the sacred pilgrimage's route we added stones to the abundant cairns, small and large, which had been built up over the years by devoted visitors. One glade where small towers of stones, though stationary, seemed to totter in apparent defiance of gravity, reminded me of scenes from Harry Potter⁷. On a more practical note I wondered how we were able to find any stones of our own to add to the cairns- did park wardens sneak around at night, knocking over a few towers here and there to keep future punters happy? It also occurred to me during this long, demanding yet fulfilling trek what it was about Alkhanai that had made it seem different and yet somehow more special then other Russian places of reputed natural beauty which I had visited. In contrast to the usual piles of old bottles, carrier bags and goodness-knows-what-else that denote human activity anywhere else in the Russian Federation, Alkhanai was spotless. Not a discarded fag butt to be seen. I asked my companions if wardens cleaned the park but was assured that Buryats held Alkhanai in such esteem that they would not dream of littering the place.

We left Alkhanai feeling relaxed and tranquil, bidding Sasha and Shukrat a fond farewell as they departed for the Uzbek leg of their nuptial odyssey.

NEVER fly Swiss Air. NEVER fly Vim Avia.

Regrettably, the three months granted me by the Russian visa regime were up. I said fond goodbyes to friends and bade a grateful 'Do svidaniya' to to Inna and Artur after they had kindly driven me the few miles to Chita airport. That morning we had risen early to make the flight but Artur had rung ahead to the airport only to be told that departure had been delayed until after lunch. Not to worry, I thought- I had an overnight stay arranged in Moscow before I was due to board on onward flight to Heathrow. That afternoon I stood in in the queue for check-in, ridiculously early, in a near-empty terminal, awaiting the flight to Moscow with Vim Avia, a provincial Russian carrier.

The queue lengthened behind me and all seemed fine until the check-in desk opened. The queue promptly dissolved and the Russian crowd rushed the desks, barging and jostling- men, women, children and babushki alike. One of the more civilised travellers shouted above the melee “People! Don't push! Wait your turn! We all have tickets- we will all get onto the plane!” Wise words, I thought, and extracted myself from the throng, planning to sit and watch the semi-riot until I could calmly check in towards the end of the queue. Big mistake.

Halfway through the queue, the computers at the check-in desk apparently refused to let any more passengers register. The mood quickly turned ugly as the women on the desks- not employees of Vim Avia but of the airport- were unable to explain why 'Check-in was closed' and frantically tried to phone for information.

At this point I recalled how Inna's daughter Tina, a week or two earlier, had called my attention to a TV news item about Russian airlines going bust and leaving passengers stranded due to unpaid fuel bills. She was evidently concerned about my own flying fate but I had dismissed the aviation chaos as something not worth worrying about here at the edges of modern civilisation. Now, reflecting that my travel insurance had lapsed, I began to worry. After an hour or so of increasingly more furious shouting among the hundred or so non-checked-in passengers, an announcement was made. I didn't understand and managed to get a fellow strandee to explain that Vim Avia had sent a plane which was too small to carry everyone who had bought tickets. “But I have to fly to London tomorrow morning” I whined. Shrugs all around. A representative of Vim Avia briefly surfaced behind a perspex screen, but fled in fear of his life after five minutes with none of the livid throng any the wiser. After another couple of hours with no information⁸ I watched the small plane depart for Moscow from the terminal's viewing deck, my emotions almost in a suspended state of disbelief at what was (or was not) occurring.

A good while later, an announcement told we stranded Vim victims to walk to an hotel near to the airport and to wait for the following day's flight. I decided that my best bet was to avail further upon the hospitality of Inna and Artur and to spend one final night with them. By this time I had used my last mobile credit on goodbye texts and in desperation asked the woman at the information window if there was a payphone in the terminal. I must have looked a broken man at her “Nyet” as a fellow wannabe-passenger of my own age immediately fished a mobile from his pocket and offered it to me, Gratefully, I made a quick call to my ever-willing host family and offered my saviour some roubles for his trouble. He brushed away the offer and we fell into conversation. Ilya was a Tartar from Bashkortostan in central Russia, and owned a successful chain of pharmacies in Chita. He promptly offered me a lift back into the city- his business partner came to collect us and took me straight to Inna's door. He told me they would collect me at 6am next morning for our return to the airport.

Another round of found farewells later and I was sitting at Chita airport with Ilya, him philosophical and me asking him what I could do if I missed my connecting flight in Moscow. Chit is six hours ahead of Moscow and to fly between the cities takes roughly six hours- had Vim flown direct (as advertised) then I might have made the onward flight with Swiss Air that day. I had emailed Swiss Air explaining that I was stranded, and naively expected them to help me out as Easyjet had once dome for me in similar circumstances. Failing that, I naively expected Swiss Air to respond to my message. That day Vim limped us across Russia in an old crate of a plane- seemingly a converted troop carrier with the boarding ladder leading into the rear of the fuselage. We called at Bratsk (a city whose name is synonymous with ecological devastation) and Ekaterinburg (famed for the slaughter of the Romanovs) before arriving in Moscow at around midnight. I had missed my connecting flight by a spectacular seventeen hours or so, having originally planned to be in Moscow the day before its departure. All the way, Ilya had been the most helpful, patient and pleasant companion I could have wished for, and he spent literally hours reassuring me that all would be fine as I fretted visibly about what might happen upon reaching Moscow. In Bratsk he had had to argue me back past security in order to re-board the plane as I had left my passport aboard the plane whilst we waited in the terminal- none of the Russian passengers made the same mistake.

On the Ekaterinburg to Moscow leg we sat down next to an attractive young girl who was reading basic English textbooks. Ilya nudged me and urged me to introduce myself. I did so and we three passed the flight in pleasant conversation once she had gotten over her apparent shock at having been plonked down next to an English bloke. Ilya told me he was a big fan of the film 'Love Actually' and in particular of Rowan Atkinson, known in Russia as in many countries as 'Mr Bean'. Wanting to thanks Ilya for his tireless help, I rummaged around in my luggage and gave him my 'Best of Blackadder' DVD. Ilya spoke no English but nonetheless seemed pleased.

In Moscow's Domodedovo airport there were no staff at the Swiss Air desks, the local time now around midnight. I had only a London contact number for the airline and Ilya insisted I call it on his mobile. To my shock and horror, the Swiss Air 'Customer Service' representative snootily told me that my situation was not his airline's problem. I had failed to check in and so had forfeited my flight. End of story- Swiss Air's hands firmly washed of me. I asked what I could do, given that I was now stranded in Moscow. He offered me a replacement flight for somewhere significantly north of one thousand pounds. I did not have that kind of money, I pleaded. Not his problem, he said, and hung up.

Seeing my stunned distress, Ilya marched up to Vim Avia's office and emerged some time later to tell me that though they could not help get me to London, they were willing to put me in an hotel overnight. Off went Ilya to get his onward flight home to Ufa, me having thanked him profusely for his overwhelming generosity of spirit. I cannot overstate how much he helped me in dire circumstances: a person surely encounters such selflessness only a few times in their life.

Weighing up my options, I paid five hundred quid on a card to British Midland to fly to Heathrow the next day. This was to stamp into my consciousness as if with a branding iron the maxim “Never travel uninsured”. The Vim Avia staff gave me a couple of airline meals and some paperwork with which they assured me I could claim at least some compensation, and put me on a bus with a young woman and her two young children for the trip to the hotel. As I boarded the bus my eyes began to stream and I was temporarily blinded- by tiredness, stress or the pollution of the Moscow air, I do not know. We sped down the quiet motorway for a few miles when the driver suddenly pulled over into a layby in the middle of nowhere. “It's the fan belt”, he said. I thought it strange that the bus had seemed fine until he stopped, but after a few minutes' fiddling we were on our way again. Soon enough, he pulled over again. Not a building in sight. He jumped out of his cab and two cars soon pulled up behind us. A man stuck his head into the bus and asked me where the driver was. In my fatigued state, none of this had struck me as being particularly weird, until the young mother turned to me and said “What's going on? Who is guaranteeing our safety?” Suddenly I found it very hard to swallow the mouthful of cold airline food which I had been munching. Here we were, in the small hours, on the hard shoulder of a deserted motorway with a driver claiming that his apparently-healthy bus was kaput and with two cars having materialised, for some possibly sinister reason, from the ether to join us. I motioned to get out of the bus, thinking that I should not leave the woman and her children to find out what fate had befallen us, but she- pale with worry by now- whispered to me to stay put. With all Vim Avia and Swiss Air had put me through, I was beyond tiredness, and strangely beyond fear. That moment was a strange nadir as I accepted, with an oddly calm fatalism, that if we were now in the hands of Russia's famed criminal fraternity then there was bugger all I could do about it. My mind emptied of thought. I seemed to be viewing my body, and this whole nightmare scenario, as if I were hovering above my own head.

Then another bus arrived and took us to the hotel.

I spent six fruitless months chasing, ringing and writing to Vim Avia in search of compensation and to Swiss Air in search of an explanation as to why their representative had treated me as something he had just stepped in, when I called him from Moscow that night. Vim Avia appear to have a deliberate policy of reassuring anybody they have screwed over that their letter will be answered by their corporate lawyers “next week”- this was the line given to me and to Russian friends over the half-year in which we persistently chased them. Swiss Air, on the other hand, continued to brush me off as if I had just crawled out from under a stone. I accept that legally, they had no obligation to help me, but can never accept that any modern organisation should stoop so low in its attitude toward customers who have encountered problems through no fault of their own. My resentment of Swiss Air runs deeper than the deep disgust I feel for Vim Avia: Vim Avia are incompetent beyond words, but Swiss Air's attitude was condescending and dismissive throughout.

To my delight, after six months of silence and obfuscation from the two airlines, my company's insurers kindly decided that, since I had been in Russia doing company business, they would reimburse my £500. I was very grateful, but I had learned two important lessons:

1. Never fly Vim Avia.

2. NEVER fly Swiss Air.