Day 1

I flew out of Barnaul. The flight was 4 and a half hours. I thought I'd look at the ground from the window, but only aisle seats were left. Oh well, I thought, I'll have time since there's a 9-hour flight to New York ahead. I arrived at Domodedovo. As soon as I got my luggage, I started heading to the exit; I was flying with a girl named Anya from Barnaul to Pensacola. So, I looked at my watch and saw that the long hand had passed 23:00, which is exactly the time my mom told me the metro closes. We decided to spend the night at the airport, but then we started running into very friendly taxi drivers who were eager to help, saying, 'Hey young man, to the center for 3 thousand,' without specifying if it was rubles or dollars. Well, okay, maybe we could stay at a hotel, so we went to the desk and asked how much it cost. They told us 7-10 thousand, we turned around, and there were the taxi drivers again. One approached us and said, 'Listen, I'll take you to any hotel for 3300, I'll even provide a room, everything is included, there are tons of hotels here.' I asked for the name of the hotel, to which he replied, 'I don't remember, there are tons of them.' We kept walking. Then a young man approached, spinning his keys, and said a phrase that even stunned me: 'Perhaps you need to resort to non-standard solutions in your extraordinary situation.' I froze for a moment, but I had to find another way. I thought, what if I ask someone—definitely not a taxi driver—what time the metro closes? We approached a smoking flight attendant, and she replied that it closes at 1:00 AM. Without thinking, we ran to the ticket office for a train to the metro station, which takes 45 minutes. Of course, there were tons of taxi drivers again saying, 'Hey, what metro? It's already closed.' We got on the train, went, then rode the metro for about 40 minutes. We got out and went to the place where we would stay for 2 days, the dormitory of the Institute of Environmental Engineering. They gave us keys and we went in. When I walked in, I was shocked—this isn't a dorm, our 'Barnaul' hotel is the same, a private bathroom, a fridge, 2 single-story beds, and even a KETTLE!! I felt like an aristocrat from Sitnikov. We went to sleep.