So, this is my last day in Moscow.

Serge and Oleg took me on a late night car tour of the city, which at night is lit up like Manhattan and takes on a totally different feel. Just like in NY and some European cities, there were lots of people out having dinner and drinks and getting ready to party.

The last adventure of the trip was the Demedodovo Airport! The airport, unlike Nizhny Novgorod, is very modern. However, when I got in the queue just to get through the door, it must have had over 300 people in it.

A Very British Tradition

As I practiced the British tradition of queuing, it turned out that the delay was being caused by Security checks.

Every single person had to have all of their bags x-rayed and then pass through a metal detector. High security indeed you would think. Unfortunately, even though the metal detector consistently beeped as people strolled through, I didn’t see a single person stopped.

Probably because the guard was too busy chatting to the woman scanning the bags. The upside was that the queue moved fast.

Once through this security check I was amazed that my passport and documents were then checked a further 7 times as I moved through to the gate.

One of the checks was in a very cool “sniffing device”. You walked into it, held your arms up and it blew air over you and sniffed for anything unusual. First time I have seen anything like that and I think a little better than the ones in Heathrow that scan through your clothes – at least you keep your dignity intact. I have seen the pictures taken of me before and they are not pretty and not something you would want to end up on You Tube or the web (This is an example of the type of image that you see from one of the new scanners)!

The airport (unlike JFK) had lots of great shops so there was plenty to look at and do while there and the return flight was fine – not quite the rush of a Mig.

The whole thing was an incredible experience and has left me with some lasting impressions of how small the world actually is and how incredibly fast we can move, in the engineering sense and in the cultural one, if we put our minds to it.

Russia is an incredible place!