Moscow/3

I noticed a grey haired Russian man in a black leather jacket and stone washed jeans walking towards us as Grace had made her speech about tribalism. And I wondered if the noise our group was making had annoyed somebody into putting in a complaint…
The man said something in Russian as he walked up to our group but we looked at each other, wondering what exactly he was asking. I know I had heard something that sounded like “Nigeria” and “student“, but wasn’t quite sure. Grace who had been standing a bit further away stepped closer to the front and asked him something in Russian.
And he responded. The look on her face at first gave away the fact that she did not quite understand what he had been saying. “Shto?” I heard her say.
“Viy Nig’eritskiy studienti?” the man repeated his question.
“Da” she replied.“But I speak very little Russian” she said “so you need to talk very slowly, or talk in English…”
“Okay, I Oleg. And I come take you to hotel” He said in broken English.

Oleg had turned up almost 2 hours late because the bus he had originally arranged for us had developed some problems at the last minute and as a result he had to make alternative arrangements for another one. After apologising for keeping us waiting, he took us to the waiting bus, which was to take us to the International Students hotel. According to Oleg, we were lucky because the hotel, which was located about 50minutes drive away, was one of the best in Moscow and had been one of those used to accommodate athletes during the Moscow Olympics 6 years earlier.

Our bus left the airport premises and drove towards the Leningrad highway or Leningradskoe’ shose’ as it is known in Russian. This is the main highway that leads to the city from Sheremetyevo and as we entered the highway we found ourselves locked into a traffic jam.
“We lucky we not go in opposite way!” said Oleg. Those heading towards the airport were in a worse traffic jam than us. If not for the rather peculiar models of the cars, the beeping of the car horns left me feeling that I was caught up in a traffic jam along the 3rd mainland bridge in Lagos!
“Reminds me of being caught up in a go-slow in Lagos!” Grace said. She was sitting in the seat next to me…
“That’s the second time you’ve done that!” I said.
“Second time I have done what?”
“Read my mind. You just said almost exactly what I was thinking “
“Really, and when was the first time?”
“When those other guys had started the tribal war earlier on and you had asked them to stop being stupid”
“Well, I don’t read peoples minds.”
“Anyways, How comes you understand a bit of Russian?” I asked.
“It’s only a very little bit! But its because my dad studied in Russia and I’ve been practicing the very basics with him from the time I was told about the scholarship.”
“I am impressed!”
“Don’t be. My dad says that everybody ends up speaking the language anyway. And that within a few months we’ll all be quite fluent!”
Me?; becoming fluent in Russian Language? in a few months?! This was hard to believe. It was just that the Russian language sounded so very difficult; Russians even have their own alphabet, which would take like ages to learn!

Our bus eventually pulled into the parking spot of the International students’ hotel. The hotel was a very tall building probably up to 12 floors located in a complex that had several nearby smaller buildings. The entrance to the very tall building, which I guessed was the main building, was swarming with students. They seemed to be spilling out from the foyer into a long queue, which was snaking its way into the car park. The time was now almost 4pm and I realised that it had taken us about 2 hours to negotiate the 50minutes trip from Sheremetyevo airport. As we got out of the bus I noticed that the weather had become slightly warmer than it had been when we arrived over 7 hours ago.

We joined the queue behind a group of students from Ethiopia. The long queue was made up of students, grouped according to their countries of origin with their luggage’s clustering all around them and babbling in a cacophony of languages. As I listened to the chatter I wondered if it had been like this during the last days of Babel, when the people were said to have abandoned the building of the tower because of the confusion in languages. The Ethiopians in front of us were talking in a language, which I was hearing for the first time while just in front of them stood a very large group of students chatting exuberantly in a language I guessed must have been Arabic going by the fact that the students looked like some of the Lebanese people I had seen in Nigeria.

We were all queuing up to get registered at the hotel. Registration would involve confirming that the names that were forwarded to the authorities from the embassies, corresponded with the ones in our passports. And following this clarification, we would then be assigned rooms in the hotel and given food vouchers, with which we could eat in the nearby canteen. We were to remain in Moscow until we are medically cleared following from which we would then be posted on to the different Russian language preparatory schools all over the Soviet Union.

The queue continued to move forward very slowly at a pace that even a snail would not have considered challenging enough. And by the time that it got to our turn, the hotel was already filled up and as such we had to be sent to a nearby hostel-type building, which was at that time undergoing renovation.