Monday, June 25, 2007

An unfinished story

I never really brought closure to the luggage story that developed as we were in Russia. Most of you know that our luggage never made it on our trip. What you may not know is how we finally found it.

It turns out that our luggage made it as far as Moscow. Therefore, on our way back through Moscow we were able to find them in their "lost" luggage area. (Just in time to check them back in) Because we had a fairly lengthy layover in Moscow, we had plenty of time. We meandered through the airport and finally found the luggage area. After showing them every possible piece of identification and airline ticket stub, we were allowed to go into: (music break) THE BAGGAGE CAGE

It was unreal....

It sort of reminded me of the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc, when they're moving the boxed Arc into the warehouse and there is like 100,000 square feet of identical boxes. (only in our case, they were all black suitcases wrapped in clear plastic) Unfortunately, ours are black too. You know, you would think that the engineers at Samsonite would try harder to make more varieties of bags....

But anywho, we walk in and there is no pattern - no file system - no number system - no chronical system - it was all so..... Russian. So we started walking through the mess. In what would later be identified as a modern day divine miracle, Katie found both of our bags within 3 minutes.

I took a picture of the back corner of the room. The picture is a little blurry because I turned off the flash. By this point in our trip I had been reprimanded 3 different times for taking pictures in Russia. I was starting to catch on to the fact that they don't like people taking pictures of their airports and their stores. (Go figure)

So keep in mind that this is only a small part of a much larger room. I merely had to hide in the back in order to capture the picture.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, watch the picture taking. I know it's illegal to take pictures from airplanes or trains in Russia--not sure about in stores or airports, but probably there is some kind of a rule about that too!

Glad you found your baggage--our suitcase stayed behind in the USA on our first trip, and caught up to us in Khabarovsk as we were turning around to fly home! We had time (barely) to pull out our orphanage donations, zip the thing back up and check it for the flight home! Hubby spent the trip in one pair of pants, but fortunately I'd put a spare shirt and socks and underwear in the carry on for him, so he survived. On the second trip, we mixed everyone's clothes through all the suitcases so everyone would have SOMETHING if we had a repeat.