So from Yaroslavl I took a bus that goes straight to the airport in Moscow- thank goodness! So instead of taking the express train to Moscow, the metro to the aeroexpress train and getting to the airport, a bus was able to do all that in 6 hrs.
On the bus ride, my snickers which I had packed for a nutritious breakfast in Prague during my layover had melted to the heat coming from the bottom of the bus. Luckily I was able to save them before they became liquidly, hot chocolate.
When I got to the airport I decided to get past security and just wait inside for the 4 hrs, but little did I know you can only check in 2 hours before. So when I got through a first baggage security checkpoint and then a line where they look at your itinerary (which the guy didn’t tell me anything) then wait about 15 minutes to finally be told by the lady that I needed to sit and wait until 8pm for me to check in, so I had to walk back out and sit in a waiting area of two hours.
About an hour into waiting a police officer came around to where we were sitting, we being everyone waiting for 2hrs before their flights. There surprisingly were a lot of different people ethnicities, and I heard Chinese and Arabic which of course being an airport makes sense…sort of, cause this is Russia and they might not believe in foreigners, I’ll talk later about that in a different post.
Sitting not to far away from me sat people from the Caucus area of Russia, who have darker features and traits throwing more to the Asian influence. He walked up to every single person of that group (who later turned out to be heading to Tashkent, Uzbekistan) and asked to see their papers and documents. I don’t know if I was shocked or how to describe it. Was this just outwards racism? People say that Political Correctness and that stuff don’t really exist in Russia, but what can we describe this as? A simple routine check-up ONLY to the people those ‘look’ foreign. Meanwhile, I could have easily been a drug trafficker or some outrageous, dangerous person; yet they never came up to me.
Something else I saw which I don’t know how to explain because I really have no idea what was going on was there was some sort of Chinese tour group apparently heading back to China but as I was heading through passport control, I noticed that the officers had sort of rounded them up and had two of the guys handcuffed to each other. I have no idea what was going on but would have been interesting to see for what reason they though they needed to be handcuffed.
Nonetheless, I made my way through passport control, security and on to my flight to Prague where I had a 19 hour layover before heading to Madrid, Spain!
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