Ryan goes to India Part I: Sofia and Sheremetyevo (Moscow) Airports

The adventure began right from the very beginning – Sofia Airport. To provide some information, I flew Aeroflot through Moscow on my way to Delhi. If you are transferring flights at Sheremetyevo (Moscow’s main airport) you do not need a Russian visa. You only need on if you intend to leave the airport. If you have a very long layover I think you might need a transit visa, but this didn’t apply to me. I know all of this because I did research on it before leaving. This information had not made it to the Aeroflot counter at Sofia’s airport. My conversation with the ticket agent went something like this:

Ticket agent: You don’t have a visa for Russia.
Me: I don’t need a visa, I’m only transferring in Moscow on my way to Delhi.
Ticket agent: You still need a visa.
Me: No. I don’t. If you look at the web page for Sheremetyevo’s airport it will tell you exactly what I am now telling you.
Ticket agent: Americans need a visa to go to Moscow.
Me: I know that, but I’m not going to Moscow, I’m going to Delhi.

At this point the ticket agent asks another ticket agent, who didn’t know. Eventually my ticket agent had asked the entire ticket agent staff at Sofia and none of them knew anything about visa requirements for transfers in Moscow. Does no one flying from Sofia transfer planes in Moscow? Eventually they decided they needed to call Moscow to ask if I needed a visa. While they were trying to reach Moscow a supervisor happened to walk by who actually knew that you don’t need a visa when transferring flights. After about 25 minutes at the ticket counter everything was sorted out. I made my way to immigration to get my passport stamps and the first thing the immigration agents says is, “You don’t have a Russian visa – you need a Russian visa.” I had to go through the whole thing again with immigration, luckily they were able to figure out the answer pretty quickly.

So I have with me a carry-on roller travel bag and my backpack. I didn’t check anything because I had a feeling the chances were high that Aeroflot would lose my luggage. I don’t care if they lose it on my way home, but I didn’t want to lose all my clothes for the wedding and have to scramble when I got to Delhi to find new clothes.

Anyway, in every other plane there is ample room for a travel bag in the overhead compartments. On Tupolev-154 there is not. Russians are very anti-carry-on baggage – I have discovered this on my trip. The overhead compartments were so small I could barely get my half-full backpack in it. Now I still have my roller bag and no place to put it. I ask the flight attendant if there was someplace I could put it and she just told me “you should have check it” and walked away. I guess it’s my problem now. Through some Tetris-style movements I was able to cram the bag between my seat and the bulkhead in front of me (luckily I had a bulkhead seat). The problem with this is that I had to sit with my feet propped up on my bag for 2.5 hours with my knees in my face. On any other airline that wouldn’t have been allowed, but no one seemed to bat an eye at my unusual sitting position when we took off. Through some occasional shifting I was able to keep the blood circulation in my legs high enough to prevent them from dying off due to lack of oxygen.

I think Russians also like bread. With every Aeroflot meal I had there were at least 3 items of bread. My trip from Sofia to Moscow had a slice of bread, a roll and another roll stuffed with minced mystery meat inside. The rest of the meal was rounded out with 2 slabs of pork. My flight back had almost an identical meal only the stuffed roll was replaced with a second plain roll and there was one half of a cherry tomato with the slabs of pork.

We arrive in Moscow without incident and I follow the signs to the transfer desk (as opposed to immigration so I can get into the main terminal area without a visa). I was the only person on my plane whose final destination was not Moscow – I guess that’s why the Aeroflot staff in Sofia were so confused.

Now I got the full Sheremetyevo experience. Sheremetyevo is a bad airport. I recommend avoiding it at all costs. There isn’t even a fast food chain in the airport. When the airport isn’t even good enough for McDonalds – that’s bad.

The airport is shaped sort of like a stretched octagon with one piece missing (meaning you can’t walk around it in a complete circle). It is set up with multiple outer sections and one inner section. The outer sections are all the terminals, but you can’t enter this section until 1 hour before your flight is to depart. The inner section if where everyone waits to get to the outer section. It is not separated by terminals as the outer section is – you can walk all around the inner section (a full trip from one side to the other is about a 7 minute walk). The inner and outer sections are separated by a glass wall so you can see how excited the people are who are finally getting to leave the airport.

My flight was delayed by 6 hours so I got to spend a lot of time roaming around the inner section. In fact, when I looked at the departure board, every flight leaving Moscow was delayed by at least an hour with the average being about 2 hours. It wasn’t because of the weather – as far as I could tell. My flight was delayed in one hour increments every hour. So, every hour I would get excited that I was leaving, only to see it delayed again by another hour.

The first thing you see when you get in the airport are the 328 duty free shops – none of them with particularly appealing prices. There are also a couple small, overpriced, pseudo restaurants. The pseudo-restaurants have about 10 pages of alcohol and only 1 page of food. Since I was stuck for 6 hours in the airport I ate at one of them. The food page of the menu listed (no joke), two types of nuts, mini-pizzas, crackers and caviar. Every item was 1 euro except the caviar, which was 20 euro. I ordered 3 mini-pizzas which were about 2 inches in diameter and a beer.

All the airport décor is brown – the floors, walls, ceiling, and exterior – all brown.

The number of people to chairs is about 1000:1. There are only a handful of chairs in the entire airport, yet many people have long layovers there. Most of the hallways were filled with people sleeping on newspapers on brown tiled floors. The terminals have a slightly higher ratio of chairs, but of course you can’t even get into that section until your flight is about to board and don’t need them. The glass wall between the two sections is really torture when you look at the empty chairs from the comfort of your newspaper bed on the cold tile floor. Good thing I had my Nintendo DS Lite to keep me company for several hours.

Finally we took off for Delhi a mere 6 hours late. We were the last flight to leave Moscow that night at 1am (we were supposed to leave at 7pm). My guess for the delay was plane troubles because I was supposed to fly an Ilyushin-96 plane, but it ended up being a Boeing 767.

The meal from Moscow to Delhi was a chicken ball. It was a ball of chicken with (bad) cheese in the middle. I should have called ahead to order a veggie meal like 80% of the plane had done. The flight attendants had about a 4 page list of all the (mostly Indian) passengers who had special ordered vegetarian meals.

Aside from being 6 hours late, we made it to Delhi without any incident. My adventures in Delhi will continue in additional blog installments. Stay tuned…

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