Thursday - Comedy of Errors

HERE is a link to the pictures I took yesterday.

While I was waiting to be met at the hotel, I walked down the street where I had seen a lot of coffee shops.  I found one whose name was in English called Coffeeshop Company and went in.  It was pleasant and clean and the waitstaff had black slacks and shirts with the logo and a banzai type headband.  I don't exactly know what look they were going for.

I had a large cappucino which was served in a glass rather than cup.  Then I had a second.  It was after noon and I hadn't had coffee yet.  The coffee machine in the breakfast room at the hotel was out of service.  I'll go back to this coffee shop on Sunday evening when I'm back in Moscow.

It turned out that the guy who came to meet me, Michael, was someone I knew.  In fact on Sunday I will officiate at his wedding to his partner.  There were three folks from Holland with him. Willie, Annemarie, and Diane, living in Holland but from Malta.  We walked to the Metro, took the train to our general meetingplace and waited for the private bus that would take us to the conference hotel, 30 kilometers outside of Moscow.  The group gathered to wait in front of the train station.  It was good to greet old friends as they arrived.  I was especially glad to see Bishop Vladimir and his friend, Ivan, who came by train from Kiev.

The bus was pretty nice but it was an endless stop-and-go trip through horrible Moscow rush hour traffic.  We finally arrived at the hotel which is in an area surrounded by country and trees.  Nice.  The air was fresh and nicely cool after a way too hot bus ride.

We hurried up to wait at reception.  Finally we got our room assignments and shlepped over to another building to wait some more before we got keys to our rooms.  I got settled in my room (three single beds but only me in the room).  We gathered in the lobby and walked to yet another building for supper.  After supper we went back to the building we were sleeping in and finished registration.  All of this hanging around gave me a chance to visit with people I didn't know.  A really nice young woman introduced herself shyly as Anna from Minsk, Belarus.  She spent a little while telling me why I had to come to Minsk next year.

After supper we went back to our rooms.  It was getting to be late.  We were so sooner in our rooms than we were summoned to the lobby.  It seems that there was no hot water in our building so we had to move.  So we took our luggage and went through the dark to another building - and waited.  After about half an hour we were told.  "Well, never mind, we should go back to the building with no hot water and they'd fix it in the morning."  So once again we gathered in a lobby waiting for our keys to be given back and then went to the rooms that had originally been assigned to us.  It took me two minutes to crash.  Someone knocked loudly on my door saying some incomprehensible thing which I decided to ignore and went to sleep.

What a day.