First Moscow Visit – Part 1: On the Flight

Well I am on the flight on the way to Moscow for the first time, as you will have probably guessed from the post title, I make no apologies, I am just damned tired but can’t sleep! Not sure whose idea it was to get the 10pm flight that arrives at some ungodly hour local time, despite the flight being only 3 1/2 hours or so! I figured I will put this time whilst I can’t sleep to good use by having a bit of a rant to be posted later.

So, a bit of a recap for people who don’t know what is happening with our move to Moscow; Well the truth is, we are not totally sure it is going to happen! So the visa rules have apparently changed, the permanent visa (for 3 or 5 years or something like that) application has to wait until the next round in October.  That part is fine, but this last few days we have been told that the Commercial visa we were going to move with initially might be different than we originally lead to believe due to rule changes in December.  We were told this visa would allow us to stay for 90 days, then leave for a day, then back in for another 90 days, so not a major issue.  Anyway, we have now been told by the local HR office of my wife’s Company’s parent company that this MAY not be the case, it MIGHT be that we have to leave for 3 months after the initial 3 months! So the visa situation will be what it is, and is totally up to the country in question, but why the HR department (who have known about my wife going to work there since Mid October) haven’t found out the situation for sure is a mystery.

So they seem to want us to wait for three or six months more before moving out to Moscow, but as I have previously said I left my job for this move, so we probably can’t afford to wait that long until moving. So in normal economic times I could get a temp contract that would pay very well, but right now the contracts are not there.  Apparently there are other postings available too, so we will see which way things go, meanwhile we are going to enjoy Moscow until Sunday and go and view some apartments, assuming we will move there in the next few weeks.

Back to this long weekend in Moscow, I am very excited, but tiredness is rapidly eating away at me, I just hope passing through immigration goes relatively smoothly so we can get to the hotel and sleep for a few hours. The flight took of from London Heathrow at 10pm-ish, but Moscow is 3 hrs ahead, so we land sometime between 4am and 5am local time, it’s a little like a red-eye flight, without it being long enough to get much sleep.

The plan for Thursday is to meet with a lady from the local office of the parent company in the afternoon who will go with us to look at a few options of places to live in Moscow. Friday will bring more apartments to view, followed by later on possibly meeting up with someone from Twitter, and also due to meet a guy who is due to work for my wife in Moscow too! On Saturday we have had a tour organised for us around the city, not sure where to yet, but I am sure we will enjoy it. Hopefully we will get chance in our downtime to look around on our own and hopefully bumble along with our very limited Russian. I am going back to try to drift off for a few minutes now.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 7:12 pm. It is filed under Blog, Life and tagged with Moscow, Moving, Problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.