Russia Chronicles: Before We Even Got There

The first time I traveled abroad, I was 11, I think...or maybe 12. Anyway, I was young and in that weird just entered middle school phase of maturation. My dad had been working in Russia for several months at a time and had enough frequent flyer miles to fly my mom, my sister and I over to St. Petersburg for a visit one summer. It was 1991, so a lot in Russia was changing. Communism had just fallen and capitalism was quickly spreading it’s influence over the entire country. Fascinating time really, but I just thought it was cool to get a passport and fly across the world. AND, my sister and I got a new gameboy for in-flight entertainment. Honestly, I think we spent a grand total of 4 hours playing with that thing. Lets just say we don’t have gamers in the family.

We left Knoxville and flew to some major city to catch a flight to Frankfurt. Germany, cool! I remember thinking about how the Frankfurt airport looked and felt time a tunnel. People were yelling over the loud speakers in a language I didn’t understand and I was really tired. We got on a plane for St. Petersburg and were told it would take a few hours to get there. Sooner than it should the plane started to land...strange, right? Even at age 11 or 12, I knew something was amiss. At some point during the descent a lady came on the intercom and said that a passenger had lost something and we needed to land in Warsaw to find it. Lost something? Things have really changed in the past 20 years of air travel, haven’t they? What in the world could some have “lost” that would require them to land the plane in Poland not Russia? We’ll never know, although the rumor was that it was expensive jewelry. 

As the plane taxed towards the airport, we were met by several branches of Polish security officials. The airport security opened the baggage compartment and started throwing out bags. Then all of a sudden, what looked like Polish police officers grabbed airport security, threw them against their cars and start padding them down...cue James Bond style secret agent swooping down with a helicopter, manhandling the security officials and snagging the bag with the missing jewels...Ok, ok, so the truth of the story stopped with James Bond, but several forms of Polish official looking security folks did proceed to pad each other down for awhile. After this display of utter confusion, the officials made up and put the bags back on the airplane. We taxied towards the runway and were off again. Random, but for a 11 or 12 year old, her mother, and her younger sister it was all a little too strange and probably a bit exciting too. Mind you all we really knew about Russia and Russians was the Cold War and all those movies portraying them as our arch-rivals, threatening us with nuclear war. Oh, and that our dad had been a few times and survived, so we decided to cling to that thought and in the end just looked at each other with “that was really crazy” looks on our faces....nuclear war averted! Little did we know the madness had only just begun.