Like Husband, Like Wife

Earlier this year, my college wife (it’s a long story, my uni’s weird) almost missed a flight to Lisbon. She got off the Stanstead Express eight minutes before the gate closed. With hindsight, she seems pretty chill about it. In her words, she ‘just had to parkour through security’. Competitive soul that I am, I decided to take Katie on. Check-in for my flight to Yerevan closed at 0830 last Friday. So as my taxi pulled up to Yemelyanovo airport at 0831, I was a little bit terrified that I’d just simultaneously won the game of ‘danger flight’ that we all know is an ongoing unspoken competition between all travellers and lost £120.

I know, I know. You’re dying to know why I’ve come to Armenia. Well the truth is… drumroll please… *pauses for suspense*… *inhales slowly*… *pauses some more*… I’m just renewing my visa. Armenia was probably the cheapest, coolest place to come to do that.

You’d have thought that after my recent awful experiences with Yandex Taxi (see Disaster Day for more giggles about Theo being late for stuff), I’d have learnt my lesson. Alas, I’m not that receptive to lessons. I strolled out into the freezing (actually considerably below freezing) morning air at 0700 with plenty of time to spare, and blithely ordered a taxi to my location, which was automatically selected by the app. Having ordered, I inspected the location that the app believed I was in more closely. It was the bus stop on the main road, ten minutes from my flat. Not to worry – the taxi wasn’t going to arrive for ten minutes anyway. When I finally got to the bus stop on Akademika Kirenskogo Street, my phone pinged to tell me that my taxi had arrived. I sure as heck couldn’t see it. I withdrew my hand from the warmth of my coat pocket in order to check the map again. Yandex had not ordered the taxi to the bus stop on Akademika Kirenskogo Street, it had ordered it to the bus stop on Svobodniy Prospekt – twenty five minutes from my flat IN THE OTHER DIRECTION. Now I have to take partial responsibility for this, because I didn’t check exactly where the app thought I was located, but WHAT??

T- one hour and fifteen minutes before check-in closes, and Yandex Taxi had once again surprised nobody by giving me a ‘the driver will finish his current journey and head your way’ notification, with an estimated waiting time of ten minutes.

T- one hour before check-in closes, and the taxi still hadn’t arrived. I was travelling light, and gloves wouldn’t be needed in Yerevan, so my hands were just on the brink of falling off when my phone started ringing. It was my taxi driver ‘HiiiiiyeahIdon’tknowwherekinoteatrudarnikissoI’mjustwaitinginalaybyhopingyou’llfindmethatok?’

‘Uh. Sorry I didn’t get that’ I sighed, with a mental image of my flight taking off and the pilot cackling maniacally as I was still trying to find my cab driver.

I’m still not sure whether the driver actually spoke Russian. His voice was totally and utterly unintelligible. In the end I said ‘JUST GO TO THE PYATEROCHKA AND WAIT FOR ME THERE’. It seems he understood me, because after another ten minutes of driving round in circles and getting scarily close to the slip road to a big motorway before chickening out and coming back in my vague direction, he pulled up outside Pyaterochka.

T- 40 minutes before check-in closes. I got in the taxi, and the driver, without turning around, hit the ‘play’ button on his dashboard. A recording of a woman screaming at the top of her lungs blasted out the speakers at full volume. The driver still hadn’t turned around, nor had he started driving. A synthesiser came in under the loop of a woman screaming, interspersed with Latin incantations. At this point, the only thing stopping me from screaming at the driver to step on it and get me to the airport was the underlying fear that he was secretly a mass murderer who’d engineered a tailor-made surround sound pre-murder experience for all of his customers. Eventually a goofy rapper came in, with such profound lyrics as

‘I’m sure you’re sweatin', the beat is alive

I’ll make you jump, shiver, quiver, make you jump and jive

If you ever get scared, yo, take it from me:

Close your eyes and think about Ice MC’

The driver decided that this was an appropriate juncture to start driving. Slowly. I was torn between a growing horror of missing my flight, a thrill at the thought of everlasting glory in the game of ‘danger flight’, and laughing out loud at the total bizarreness of my taxi driver. I wondered if he thought the music was intended to be taken seriously, rather than just a parody. Just at that moment, the rapper shouted the words ‘PLOPPING IN MY PANTS PLO-PLO-PLOPPING IN MY PANTS’, and the taxi driver turned the music up and started bopping his head up and down. That answers that question. I’m guessing he didn’t understand the words…

T- ten minutes before check-in closes, and we were still a good ways from the airport. Another thing which hadn’t changed since the beginning of that ride, was that Ice MC’s less-than-tasteful music was playing at full blast through the speakers. During one synthesiser and percussion instrumental, the driver started swinging his head around in alarmingly wide circles, and then just rolling it around at the bottom of his neck, his chin resting on his chest, like he was possessed or something. Unless he had some superpower that I didn’t know about, he definitely couldn’t see the road with his head hanging down like that after its latest bout of rolling. Yet, by some miracle, he still got me to the airport by…

T+ one minute after check-in closes. I was sprinting towards the check-in desk. I imagine half of my mouth was grinning at the idea that nobody had ever cut a flight this fine in history, which officially made me #dangerflightchampionoftheworld, and the other half was curved down in distress and self-pity at the thought of either not being able to check in at all or else having to abandon my luggage at the airport because bag drop had surely already closed.

T+ two minutes after check-in closes. I finally located the check-in desk. And, to my utter amazement, there was still a queue. But the relief was bittersweet, because – get this – OTHER PEOPLE JOINED THE QUEUE AFTER ME! I mean. Really Russia? Not only was I not the last person to check in (at a grand total of five minutes after check-in should have closed), but apparently there were another twenty or so people who’d left it even later than me. It seems the prize of danger flight champion must go to Russian culture for its incredible laissez-faire attitude to medium-haul flights (perhaps I should add that Katie is Russian…)

Unsurprisingly, the flight left late. At 0845, when I joined the queue for boarding, I noticed that there was a bar right next to the gate, called ‘Harat’s Irish Pub’. It would be exaggerating to say that Harat’s Irish Pub was full, but it had quite an impressive crowd, and it was at least half-full of people eating crisps and peanuts and drinking pints. At 8:45 in the morning.

The flight was blissfully uneventful. I changed at Moscow, where the airport was confusingly designed, and also heated to an outrageously high temperature. When I finally found my gate, I was amused to notice that it was situated right next to a bar named ‘Shannon’s Irish Pub’, which, at around midday, was also full to bursting with people drinking pints and eating crisps and peanuts.

Yerevan itself is great. I think another blog entry on the wonderful personalities in my youth hostel will have to follow this one. Some of them are totally larger than life. Perhaps the highlight is that it’s raining here. I haven’t seen rain in an awful long time, and, at risk of sounding pathetically English, I kind of missed it.