#169 Staying overnight at an airport in Russia

Transcript

Hello, welcome to Roaming Holiday. Hello, welcome to Roaming Holiday, my travel podcast. So in 2024, I had a transfer through the airport in Shanghai, an overnight transfer that was a real to-do, man. It was different than any other airport I'd ever been to, as far as security and hoops you got to jump through and bureaucracy and just the ever-present feeling of threat. And Dick Tutorial Power, very unpleasant. I've never been to an airport like that ever. Except in 2019, when I ended up staying overnight at the airport in Moscow, it was actually a lot like that. The two situations were very similar, and I thought that was very interesting, so I was going to do a podcast about the experience of passing through China as opposed to the experience of passing through Russia. However, the China part of the story took longer than I expected, so that was actually last episode of this podcast. If you missed that, you can go grab the episode before this and get caught up. Or if you're only interested in the Russia side, here we are. So in this case, even though it was 2024 that I went through the airport in China, I actually went through the Russian airport in 2019 before the situation with Ukraine.

And I didn't have a travel podcast back then, but I did have a writing podcast. I had a podcast about writing a novel. So I took a break from talking about writing novels, so I could record my experiences going through Russia because it was so, it stood out. Let's just put it that way. It was a unique experience. So that's what this audio is from. I'm going to edit it together, take out any references to the whole book podcast, just make it a travel story. But this is the on the ground in real time experience of passing through Russia in 2019. And I think it's a pretty good story. Frankly, I think it's a better story than the China one. More interesting, more weird, more stuff that I mean, let's just get into it. So all right, let's take it away. Me from 2019, flying from Amsterdam to Tokyo through Moscow.

Let's go.

Test test. Hello. Hello. Welcome to how to write a novel. I am in an obscure corner of a weird foreign airport. And I got an hour and a half to kill. So let's try and do a podcast and see how weird this is. Let's see if I can do this without the Russian Federation taking me down. So yeah, I'm in Russia. So one of the fun things about traveling outside in North America that I didn't really know because North America is not what you can do. You just kind of take whatever flights they give you and you can, you know, use certain amounts of transfers and alterations you can make, but not a serious amount. Like I just didn't realize in the rest of the world how many airlines there are and how much shit is going on. It's crazy. So like this flight to Japan, it's like $500 one way, which is maybe $550, you know, not like amazing, but pretty good because it goes through Moscow from Amsterdam to Moscow. And there was one that was even cheaper. The cheapest one I could find was $400, but it was like a 27 hour. What was it? There was one I think that was a 44 hour trip, like just these long layovers, which is crazy and weird. And I could see doing it for like a reality show, but not for actual life. That would be insane. This one pretty good. Three and a half hour flight to Moscow and then a nine and a half hour flight to Japan. You know, that's pretty rough. Not what I wanted to do in one day, but hey, whatever, you got to get to Japan somehow, right?

And unfortunately, man, I was good the whole month. I got so sick, crazy sick my last weekend in Amsterdam, where it was just like hit me real fast and it was just like no energy. I didn't leave my room for two days. I can't remember the last time I've done that.

Then I get into Russia and yeah, the flight was late leaving Amsterdam, which I didn't really think twice about, because it's like whatever. I've never had a plane leave on me. They always just hang around. They just wait whatever. It's weird. It's like how traveling, how you know, obviously the first thing you notice are the stereotypes and how true they are on the surface. Obviously, this is I've been in Russia for fucking a few hours and it's just the airport, but right away you do notice stuff like there's the efficiency of stuff like this flight is going to leave. 5:00 We're not waiting. This flight's leaving. Fuck it. We're going. This is the time on the ticket. You be there. You go fuck yourself. But at the same time, there's the inefficiency of getting through the airport, getting from point A to point B is so slow and so badly designed and badly organized and nobody gives a fuck. These dour ass workers are just like you're on your own, buddy. Good luck. Oh, you didn't make it. Well, hey, whatever. We're all in Russia. What do you want? So basically, though, I kind of got my wish because I was like, I don't want to do this nine and a half hour flight. I don't want to do it. And then when I get to Tokyo, I get there at like 10.30, but my Airbnb is not available till 4.30 in the afternoon. So I still got a whole day. I got to dick around. I just not in any condition to do this. So when the lady at the little desk, which was you should have seen this thing, man, it's like imagine papers please that video game except everybody rushes at once. The lineup doesn't move one at a time, but that same kind of tone. But yeah, just this gaggle of people, this rush of people going through this shit, it's all disorganized and crazy. But I managed to get to the little lady who was supposed to tell me if I had any hope in hell of catching my flight, which I did not. It was leaving in like 10 minutes. And once I saw, yeah, the bureaucratic nightmare of getting to the other side of the airport, fucking yeah, there was no no chance. So yeah, this lady, I don't, I mean, maybe a part of it is just the famous Canadian politeness. I mean, as you can hear, I think I'm in a pretty good mood. All things considered like, it's pretty tough. I mean, I'm never in a great mood, but it's pretty hard for me to really be in a bad mood. Things really got to go bad. And yeah, Canadian politeness or whatever, but I don't know if this lady had ever seen someone so accommodating to being told that they had to get rebooked to a new flight tomorrow. Because like, I was like, thank you. This is great, actually. I don't want to fly today. I just want to try to fucking shit my brains out for the next 24 hours and hopefully get a little past this and do this again. Like split this trip up. That's all I want. It's what I want more than anything is like I already did a trip today. I did it. I don't need to do another one. It's insane to even contemplate. So yeah, again, literally so disorganized and so weird. She just scribbled some stuff on my ticket and just said, go through there, go through this passport control thing, go figure out what you're doing with your life. You know, really not helpful per se. Not rude though, just not helpful. But I was like, that's good man, whatever, whatever. We'll sort it out. Some kind of heard her talking to a guy before me, something about a hotel and like, that's, I'll take it. This is perfect. This is yes, yes, yes, yes. 100 times yes. This is what I want. Go fucking take a day off before my crazy nightmare flight. Because it would have sucked at the best of times, but then something like this happens and it's like Jesus fucking Christ horrible. It's horrible. You know, people misused the word literally, but I think this is literally a nightmare to have to just shit all the time where to be sick or just then you're stuck on a plane and everything is just like constrained. I mean, again, we're talking by modern standards. It's not like someone's whipping me to make a pyramid here. You know, I'm keeping it in context, but by modern standards, this sucks. I'm glad I'm glad it didn't happen. So anyway, then I shuffled through the weird fucking airport and I finally got to the nice part of the airport. You know where all the stores and stuff are. And on the surface, I'm like, oh, look at this. It's like a normal airport except, you know, it's Cyrillic writing everywhere and the nice part of the airport is betrayed by the bathrooms. Man, you go to the bathroom. It's fucking horrible. It's just cigarettes put out everywhere. So then I was like, all right, I don't even quite know where to go. I'll just wander around till I ask somebody to figure out where to go to figure out what to do about this fucking flight and the hotel booking and stuff. And as I was walking around, I saw these little capsules. There's like six of them. It's like a little capsule hotel thing like you see in Japan. Sometimes except not a nice Japanese one where it's all nice and quiet and everything is laid out in this nice place and you just go into this building and go in your little capsule and go to bed. These are just in the middle of the main thoroughfare of the fucking Russian airport, the Moscow airport.

I think it's called Sherbet, because it sounds like Sherbet. And I was like, that seems a little bit, again, somewhat akin to a nightmare, especially in my current, my state I was in at that point where I was super dehydrated, just really feeling bad and the gut just tired. 10:00 Just everything was all fucked up and like, God, imagine just having a climb into one of those. So I eventually found the place I had to go to talk to the lady about ticketing stuff. And again, there's one lady, a huge line, one lady. I was there for like 45 minutes at least. Just standing there, wondering like, am I going to have to lose my place in line because I might have to just go shit. I might have to. I managed to make it. I'm starting, I'm on the mend, I think. But it was a little touch and go there real long way. Again, it's like where I'm just like, yeah, I can do this. This is fine. I don't mind. I'm polite. I'm nice. It's fine. It's cool. And then eventually it just hits a point where it's like, what is happening? This is just too long. How come there's only one person in the line behind me is just getting longer and it's like, get the fuck out of here. You fucking Russian fucks, you know, have some sense of customer service a little. Get one other person. What the fuck, you know? There's a point where it's not okay anymore. Your dour attitude and your stupid culture. I'm already turning against you after fucking two hours. But I heard the lady say like, oh, five of you. Okay, well, here's what we're going to do. It's like quarter to eight. I'll set up some stuff. Come back here a little after 10 p.m. Because then it's like, oh, we've hit nighttime. And that's when we send people off to the hotels because otherwise it's those capsules. But you don't have to really do the capsules because there's five of you. There's too many. But that made me think like, oh, wait a minute. So it's still relatively early evening and I'm just me. I'm just by myself. Am I going to get put in a capsule? It's like, oh, no. My dream came true that I wouldn't have to fly today. But now my nightmare is coming true. But I started getting used to the idea a little bit. I'm like, you know what? Maybe that would be cool. At this point, whatever. Give me the capsule. Let me just go lock myself in this weird little thing and let me pass out. I guess I'll have to get out every couple hours and stumble through the airport to go shit and go back to my capsule. Like it's going to be ridiculous. But hey, you know what? Maybe, maybe that'd be cool. Maybe that's a story, right? The fucking capsule in the fucking Russian airport.

But when they finally got to me, I didn't have to do the capsule and I just have to do the wait till 10 o'clock, wait till 10 o'clock and come back for hotel assignment. But yes, but that's cool. Like this is all basically worked out pretty well because this is what I like. Like I'm saying how I don't do tourism stuff. I don't go see shit because I don't give a fuck. What I like is stuff like this. Like I like, that's why I want to try to break up my future traveling into smaller, slower bits. I like to go slow and I like to spend time in places. Like it was weird that I stayed at this Airbnb for a whole fucking months in Amsterdam, in Outdoor. Probably no one's ever done that before for that guy. And even when I booked my place in Tokyo, the lady commented like 47 days. Wow, that doesn't usually happen because you know, it's just travelers. And I'm like, yeah, I want to just, I want to be in it. Man, I want to soak it in. So this is what is happening right now. This is exactly what I want. Like I can't really imagine coming to Moscow. That's never been on my radar because like, what do I do? I just go hang out at coffee shops and stuff. This is really the place I would come to go do that. I don't know. It just seems weird. But hanging out at the airport. Perfect. This is exactly what I want. Just this evening of hanging out just soaking in the airport. You know, it's the least Russian Russia experience you could ever have. But you just notice little things like I love that you can tell the culture of a place just by what's on their TVs. What I saw in the TV here is just some music video fucking thing on TV and some VJ chick throwing the videos, which is just quaint in and of itself because Canada and the US don't have music video shows anymore. And this video comes on and it's like super hot Russian strip club hour. It's just like these super perfectly formed women with thongs. And they're just like, there they are in the camera. That's at the airport. That's just at the airport where you're just hanging out. You know, ham sandwich. They're like, thanks. Thank you Russia. I'll take it. Like little things like that really do say something about a culture. Like what they think is taboo and what they don't care about. They don't care that there's hot ass chicks rubbing their couches in your face on TV. They like it. That's what they want. They think that's great. They want to celebrate the hotness of these Russian chicks. You would never see that in North America in a million years where you know, much more scrubbed clean and whatever, much more with just like family, friendly, PG in our public spaces.

And I also can't log on to the Wi-Fi here because you need a telephone number to get on the Wi-Fi. And this phone doesn't work as a telephone. So it can't receive SMS messages outside of Canada. So I don't know maybe my hotel will have some fucking internet. Tell my Airbnb people that I'll be a day late.

Yeah, my flight's not till four o'clock tomorrow. Have another afternoon hanging out here at the fucking airport. But yeah, I like it. I like stuff like this. I just think it's fun. It's just neat. Even when I used to take the bus to New York, just hanging out at bus stations even is kind of weirdly fun. I don't know. It's weird. Transit is miserable. It's not fun, but it is fun. The space is in between or fun. But anyway, I've been rambling long enough. What is it now? 20 after 9? I only got to make it till 10. So hopefully next time we'll have adventures from Japan.

Hey, welcome to How to Write a Novel. So, it seems like to get a little time away from people to blabbed in myself in Tokyo, seems like a good method is to go to shrines. I was at this place, the Meiji Shrine, by Yoyogi Park. Pretty busy place, pretty touristy, but even there, it's like if you just go kind of behind the shrine and go down one of the sort of access roads, there weren't that many people. So I was like, huh, I think this could be the trick. So today, just as by Sunshine City, the big mall near Ikabukuro Station, and there's a little windy and overcast, so I saw a subway entrance and went in, but it was some weird subway line that I don't know what it is, and it took me somewhere that I didn't know where I was. And when I came back up above ground again, I'm like, I don't know, I don't know where I am, I'm under some overpass, I don't know what's happening. And there was a sign that said, hey, a major subway, this way, or another shrine, 500 meters the other way. I forget what it's called, starts with a G. I was like, fuck it, let's go check that out. Let's go see what's going on with the shrine. So I'm there right now, and it's smaller, but it's pretty nice. And yeah, there's fucking nobody here. It's a Monday afternoon. Just wandering around, and it is really cool, like all these shrine areas. They really do feel super traditional. It's just cool. It's like, I got some kind of sense of this just from Japanese video games I played as a kid, Alex Kid Games, and Spellcaster, anything on Sega Master System basically, because they didn't really go out of their way to localize stuff that much. So, you know, I'd just be playing these games where the dudes eating a rice ball and Onigiri, and I didn't know what the heck that was for years. Yeah, all these shrines and temples and stuff, they just, I don't know, it's what kind of need about coming here is. I didn't know what it would be like when it was all put together, because I've just seen pieces, you know, like a panel from a comic book, or just a scene in an anime, or, or even YouTube videos of people in Japan. All this stuff is contained, you know, it's like, here's what Japan looks like in a box, in a little square. So the individual pieces I've seen before, I've seen all this shrine type stuff before, for instance, but I've never seen it just around me, you know, just flowing all around. I never knew what it would be like when it's all connected. And with that sense of like, I know where this is, I know how close it is to the city, I know what the city looks like over there. I'm aware of how many drink machines that are everywhere. It's crazy, there's so many. That's hands down, I think the weirdest thing is just, I knew there were drink machines, but there's so many. It's like in Sim City or something. If somebody just selected drink machine and just held down the mouse button and just started dragging the mouse all over, and it's like just, let's just squeeze them in anywhere, anywhere that this game will allow me to squeeze one in, just squeeze it in. That's how it feels.

There's too many, way too many. But yeah, pretty cool so far. So far, I enjoyed Japan. I got some thoughts, maybe I'll get to them this episode, maybe I'll save those. Because today, I still want to talk about Moscow and the Moscow Airport. I did a podcast from the airport last episode. And it was like kind of premature. I was like, hey, this would be 20:00 cool. Let me capture this little moment. Plus, I just needed something to take my mind off of the fact that I was just so exhausted and worn out and sick, and I just needed to kill a few hours. So that podcast did the job, but there was a bunch more that happened after that. So like I said last time, my flight got delayed when it left Amsterdam. So this transfer I was supposed to make in Moscow. There was no chance I wasn't going to make it. So they're like, hey, you don't worry, we're fucking set you up with a little hotel thing. Just come back at 10 o'clock tonight. We'll sort of the hotel. And I was already getting my first tastes of just how incredibly bad the bureaucracy is in Russia. Just so slow, so unfriendly, zero customer service, customer service-based culture. Sorry, please don't be mad. Please don't write angry reviews. Please don't tell your friends that we suck. Please come back next time. Here's money. Here's an upgrade. Here's an apology. Here's food voucher. Here's everything. Please hear, hear, hear, hear. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

And from what I gathered in the Moscow airport, it's certainly that's not a North American specific thing. There were all kinds of people from all kinds of different countries that got stranded because of this flight not connecting. Going to different places, coming from different places. And they all said like, man, this would never happen. This has never happened anywhere else. Like what the fuck is going on with how shitty this is, how much this Russian airline doesn't care, how much they're not looking after us, how much this all sucks. And we kind of pieced together as the evening went on. It's kind of like a lot of buckpassing. It's like, you know, that idea that you can take an organization, take a business, take a company, take a country, take any group. And it's like shit runs downhill, you know, like the way the people at the top act is the way the organization acts. And unquestionably, the Russian mindset is this is not my fault. This is someone else's fault. We are our little group. We kind of became a little friend group throughout the day. And we managed to break through the Russian bullshit a little bit and just get some sense of what their thought process was. And their thought process was always passing the buck. The airline was like, hey, this isn't our fault. It's that fucking airport in Amsterdam that wouldn't give us flight clearance is the only reason that we're late. And then the people at the airport are like, this is in our fault. It's that fucking airline for getting you guys here late. And then once we finally got to this hotel, the hotel people were like, well, this is in our fault. This is the fucking airport dumping new people on us. And it was just so clear that everyone was resentful of the other person. Everyone thought they were having to shoulder a burden that wasn't their responsibility. And it's the exact opposite of there's this guy, Jacco Willink. He's a former Navy SEAL guy. Now he does like corporate speaking and like writes books about, you know, productivity and inspirational, get shit done, whatever. And his book is called Extreme Ownership because he said that was kind of his biggest takeaway. What he learned being the head of these Navy SEAL guys is the exact opposite of what these Russian people were doing is you take responsibility even though it's not your fault. Like if he's the leader of some platoon and something goes horribly wrong, there's just no point in passing the buck. There's no point in blaming someone else. So what he learned was most effective and what he started doing was he just took responsibility for everything. It's like, okay, this guy fucked up over here and this led to this and he's got this sense of the situation and once they get all the intel and like, how come that operation failed and what happened and and he knows why he knows it's because this guy did this and this happened here and it's technically not his fault. But it is his fault in the sense that he is the one overseeing things. If that guy over there fucked up, it's because Jaco as the leader didn't clarify well enough how things were supposed to work or wasn't careful enough in putting the right people in the right places. In a sense, it is Jaco's fault and whether it is or it isn't in order to move on, it's just better to take responsibility. Say yes, this is my fault. If you want to punish somebody, I'm the man, come punish me. But more often than not, he found that in those situations, if he deflected and he said, hey, it's not my fault, this is Jaco's fault, that just makes people not trust him, not trust his whole organization. It makes them resentful of him. It makes them uncomfortable with the whole situation. They lose faith where when he just takes responsibility, 25:00 then it allows everyone to move on. It's like, okay, that fucked up, that failed, that was something bad just happened. But that doesn't matter because time moves forward, that's over. What do we do now? What happens now? What's the next thing? And you feel so much more confident and so much more able to move forward if you trust the guy who's in charge of fixing the situation. And when the guy in charge says, yes, it's my fault. I take responsibility. This went wrong. It's my fault that it went wrong. And I'm going to make it work now. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to make this situation never happen again. And he said there are some people who just cannot do it. They just can't. There's like some kind of, I don't use ego as a bad word. You know, I think ego is important. It's good to have a strong ego, but there is, you know, there are corrupted egos or like inflated egos. There are people that have an unstable ego that just can't do that. They just cannot take responsibility. All they can do is blame someone else. All they can do is pinpoint somewhere besides themselves where a problem happened. And they refuse to take responsibility. And those people are just bad leaders and they never will be good leaders. You know, and that's basically if I had to put it in a nutshell, that's the feeling I got from every fucking strata of that organization at the Russian airport. Nobody was taking responsibility. Nobody felt like anything was their own personal responsibility. Nothing was their fault. It was all someone else's fault. And no one was going to go above and beyond or out of their way in any way to make things better.

But at the same time, the reason that was happening was also obviously because no one was empowered at all. Like North America, we are super, super individualistic obviously to the point where like even if you watch employees at McDonald's, the people who work the front of McDonald's do not have a specific job. They're just told to do whatever needs to be done. If you watch people at McDonald's, you'll see like they go check on fries. They go check on the to go orders. They make drinks. They just buzz around and do whatever needs to be done because the old method, which was just you work the fries, you work the drinks, you work the counter, wasn't efficient. If there was a bottleneck, everybody would just stand around and do nothing. It's way more efficient and better overall to just empower the employees to just do what needs to be done. Or that dude Tim Ferris, the four-hour workweek book, he was talking about the mail order like supplements and vitamins company he used to have. He felt like he had to do everything like he was being more responsible if he handled everything himself, but he was just causing bottlenecks and he was making things not flow smoothly. So he let go of the reins a little and he like empowered his employees. It's like if you have a problem, if someone has a customer service issue, if something weird is happening with shipping anything on any level, if you can fix it for, I can't remember if it was $200 to $400, but if you say $400, if you can fix it for under $400, just do it. Don't even email me, don't call me, just do it and then we'll look at it later. Keep things moving, you know, use your own judgment, fix it however you think is the best way to fix it. And he said just the amount that everything worked better was remarkable. So again, Russia was the exact opposite, even just that couple of days I was in Russia. Unbelievable how clear it is like that classic Iron Curtain 1980s US versus the Soviet Union thing. The fundamental tenets of it are still true. North America is about individual empowerment and Russia is very obviously not because I just, it's crazy how long it took. So we showed up at 10 o'clock, no one explained anything, everything was crazy, everything was weird. There were a few people like from India who couldn't speak English or Russian and they just got fucked. There's just no one to even care a little bit about what to do with those people. And everyone else like, it's just like it's too boring to even recount. So I'll just burn through it. But it took from 10 p.m. to by the time we finally got to a hotel and got rooms, it was 330 in the morning and we did not move far. Like we moved probably 150 feet through the airport. 30:00 And then once we got on these buses, the hotel literally next door to the airport. From the airport, there's the hotel. From the hotel, there's the airport. They're right next to each other. And it took hours because we would just slowly move, move to some security check. We had to get Russian visas just to go to this hotel even though the hotel was like a walk down. The hotel we could not leave. We could not, like I don't know what would happen if there was a goddamn fire because like the front doors won't open. We weren't allowed to leave our floor. But even just to get to that point, it was so slow. At every little stage, all this fucking physical paperwork would have to be checked and checked and checked. And it's like, I guess it's just that you can't get in trouble for saying no. You know, so everyone just wants to say no. No, no, no, no, no, until every little meticulous thing has been checked over and over and over. And everyone has agreed, okay, this is definitely okay. Now we'll move to the next step. And that happened 18 times and took hours. And it was just unbelievable. It's like, how is this the 21st century? How is this the modern world? And it really felt like an infantilized society. You know, like these people, they just felt like little kids trying to act serious. No one could be friendly. No one could be personable. Of course, everyone was scared all the time. It's like they're scared that dad is going to yell at them. They're scared that something's going to go wrong. And even though this obviously happened fucking daily with that stupid airport, they all acted like it had never happened before. There was no protocol for it. There's no way to handle this. So fucking slow. And it's one thing if it's just like, hey, I'm just some dick who wanted a cheap flight. You know, okay, so I got fucked, whatever. There were plenty of douchebag travelers like me that, you know, how much sympathy can you add for us. But there were people with kids and the kids are just like following a sleep and crying and they're just stuck in this shitty fucking corner of the airport where there's just like empty liquor bottles like it was an underpass. But this was in an airport behind a security check. How are there empty liquor bottles there? What a shitty country. What a fucked up place.

And the little kid thing is what really brought it into, just sharp relief of like, these people can't do anything or won't do anything. You know, like, if anyone should have been expedited, it's the fucking families with kids. Just get them on the stupid fucking bus in any other country. This whole thing would have taken at worst two hours. And instead it took like five and a half. Unbelievable. And day, I don't know. Again, I don't know. What else is there to say? It was fucking ridiculous. It was just bullshit. Thank Christ. You know, I was not saying last time, I was having pretty bad diarrhea problems that day. Thank fucking God that they had more or less sorted out for the day at that point. Because it just couldn't have been more of a nightmare.

And I heard, I'd never thought to look at reviews or anything of the airport or the airline because like, why would I? I just never even thought of it. But somebody mentioned to me like, yeah, I did see lots of bad reviews. And now I know why. Or like, when people were first arriving at the airport, just like the desperation in their faces. They're like sweaty faces in their wide eyes of like, really rushing to get to their next flight. Which is not something you normally see in an airport because everything is, it's modern. It's the modern age. Everything moves pretty smooth. Everything's all pretty cool. Not at that airport. And this dude I was talking to, he's like, now I know why. Now I know why they had that look. Holy shit.

Because you just get caught in fucking bureaucracy nightmare bill. So what was cool though is physically, you know, I was in bad shape. But other than that, I was pretty much the prime candidate for this type of horrible dumb bullshit to happen to.

Because I wasn't in a hurry, you know, I had 47 days or whatever booked here in Tokyo at the cheapest possible hostel I could find. So who cares if I miss a day? Who gives a shit?

And I just spent like a month in Amsterdam by myself heading out here to Tokyo where I don't know anybody, you know. Next month my friend Brad's coming to visit for like a weekend, but a lot of a lot of a loan time, a lot of solo travel. 35:00 So this whole thing was fun in that sense because it was like my chance to just kind of hang out. Like it was like a weird sleepover. Like we're all just stuck in like the worst summer camp in the world. And I kind of moved my way up the chain where on the flight to Moscow there was like an older Dutch guy who I don't remember his name because it was very Dutch name. And we just kind of bled about whatever for a little bit, but at least, you know, but then he lost his flight. He was going to Thailand, I think. So I saw him and I'm like, oh, hey, look, there's a guy. No, so that's cool. At least there's some guy that I know. And then at the 10 o'clock time when we were first waiting for our hotels, little do we know we were still five or six hours away from what should have been a half hour journey. I saw a dude who he was right before me at the little counter where they told me I was never going to catch my flight. But he was right in front of me. He was the guy who got told, hey, maybe you'll have to stay in a capsule or whatever in the hotel stuff. So I was like, oh, that's that guy. So he's also stranded. So we were just standing there not knowing what the fuck was going on with the hotel situation. So I just said like, hey. I guess we learned our lesson about transferring in Moscow, right? And we got blabbing. His name is Lawrence. He is also Dutch. I can't remember where he was going to. Maybe he was going to Thailand. Maybe everyone was going to Thailand. But yeah, he was in his mid 20s. He's a video game, dude. Like how last episode I mentioned that game papers, please. He brought that up independently. He's like, here we play that game, papers, please. Like that's what this is like. He has like, dude, nice. We will not have a hard time hanging out. We will not have a hard time finding things to talk about because that's kind of a deep cut. You have to be a pretty big video game nerd to know papers, please. So yeah, that was cool. We talked about fucking traveling around and dutchness and the insanity of Moscow or whatever.

And then as the day fucking dragged on in the endless lines and waiting and stand here, literally at one point they were like, go down these stairs. Oh, come back up the stairs. Okay, back down the stairs. And it's just like, oh my fucking god.

But in the midst of all that, I met this dude who I'm pretty sure he was from Australia. He lived in the hagg in the Netherlands, but he wasn't Dutch, but he could speak Dutch. His girlfriend, his girlfriend was Dutch. Well, I get into this with his girlfriend and Indian stuff is kind of cool. But that's the dude who saved the day for sure where he just, you know, he's like, tan kind of cool. He was closer to my age.

And he just seemed like the kind of guy who knows how to, he knows how to marshal a party. You know, this guy just knows how to connect people and how to fucking make a fun time happen. I found out later his name was Valentine. I eventually, I had to ask him because that's the other weird things like you're just hanging out with people and talking to them. But nobody actually knows anybody's names or whatever. And maybe he doesn't give his name readily. He's a little, he's like, yeah, my name is Valentine. I was like, for real? I guess that's my real name.

What was cool with that dude is that when we finally got to this hotel and we're still just stuck in the hotel and we're just lined up in the fucking hallway while they sort out rooms for people and all this fucking again checking every piece of paperwork and triplicate and quadruplicate and just over and over and just so fucking slow and awful. And at that point, I was just finally really just at a steam. I was just slumped against the wall. I was just like, oh my god, what the fuck? Like I just got nothing left in me. What the fuck is this?

Oh, that's how ridiculous it got to. Actually, these people from Brazil ahead of me in line. This took so long that by the time we got there at 330 in the morning, they had to literally had to go back. They didn't even check into the room. They just stood like immediately like, we got to get back on those buses and go back. Our flights leaving pretty soon.

And that's something I think is a great little, this is a great litmus test for how ridiculous something is. How ridiculous a society is. Is as long as you can parody something, you know, as long as you can make a joke about something, then it's not irredeemable. You know, it's like it's still somewhere within the realm of reality. But if something gets so ridiculous that you can't, you know, because I mean a joke is just exaggerating something for comedic effect.

If you can't exaggerate something anymore, that's when you're at the end of the line, man. Something really needs to change.

Like when you're overnight hotel thing at the airport takes so long and is so slow and so inefficient that as soon as you get there, you have to go right back.

That's the sketch. That's the joke. You know, you cannot get more ridiculous than that. It's not possible. That's the end of the line. It was so slow that as soon as you get there, you got to go back.

Like I was thinking like if I if I wrote a sketch about a mall in the Netherlands, it didn't have a bathroom and the joke is everyone's at the mall and they're like, where's the bathroom? How is there no bathroom? But that wouldn't be a joke. That would be factually accurate. That's how it really was where I stayed. And like how how do you parody that? How do you take that a step further? You know, you just you can't do it without going into straight absurdism of like you get to the mall and they inject more shit into you or something. Like you're at the end of the line. This can't get sillier. And when you hit that point, things got to change. That's when there's no more like, oh, it's just my culture. Oh, it's just how it is. No, it's fucking stupid. And it needs to change. Like you've just hit maximum fucking. What's that called when you've hit terminal velocity? This can't get dumber. This is at 100% dumb. Like that needs to be like a ministry in the government or something is like, let's just look around at our various laws and all right, this one's weird. That one's fucked up. This is some weird shit. We've just always done whatever. But if we find one that is so dumb, it can't even be parodied anymore. That's the thing that needs to change. That is too dumb to exist.

So anyway, I was fucking out of it. I'm like, I just cannot believe how long this took. But I'm finally at this fucking hotel. And I was like, oh god, David, I'm just about to die. And of course, what I should have done is just gone and went to bed. But my flight wasn't until like 630 the next day. So even though I was way out of it, this dude Valentine, who like I said, he knows that I rock the party. He came out of some side room. He found me slumped in the fucking hallway and he's like, hey buddy, we asked them where we could smoke. And they put us over here in this smoking room. And now we're having a party. We cracked some liquor. Come on in, come to the party room. Like Valentine is son of a bitch. All right, she got me. And this was the thing that even though I was still like sick and I knew the next day the flight was going to be long and bad and whatever. But it's like, fuck it man. This day has been so shitty. And I'm just flying off tomorrow to somewhere where I don't know anybody. And this Valentine dude is really cool and fun to hang out with. Let's go to the party room and let's just see what's happening. So it was Valentine and his girlfriend who is Dutch. But as they discussed and got into is definitely of Indian descent like from India.

This pair of girls who were from India who vaguely knew each other like they'd been to school together like 10 years before and happened to be on this flight together.