Our flight out of Chicago left O'Hare terminal 5 at around 4:30 Central time, and arrived at Arlanda Airport outside of Stockholm a little after 7. For reasons that are not clear to me, we couldn't check ourselves in for the second leg of the trip (Stockholm to Moscow on Aeroflot) at the same time as the first leg, even though it's a codeshare.

Which meant we had to clear immigrations and customs in Sweden (a breeze, really), then check in at the Aeroflot counter. Alas, it didn't open until 9:30, so we had a couple of hours to kill in the airport (outside of security, as we had no boarding pass yet). We went outside and watched our breath in the cold morning air -- it felt so good.

Eventually, we got ourselves checked in, past security, and into the waiting area to kill another 90 minutes before we would board. Lots of waiting today. I slept through the entire ARN - SVO flight (about 2.5 hours) since I got no sleep on the long haul portion.

After arriving at Moscow and clearing immigrations and customs, we bought some rubles at the currency exchange, fended off aggressively insistent taxi drivers, and made our way to the train that would take us into the city. Just in time to miss it, which mean a half hour of waiting for the next one. :)

A 35 minute train ride later, we're at the train station a few blocks from the hotel. We made a stab at walking, but a pedestrian path was not evident, and I was tired of lugging my luggage, so we took an overpriced cab to the hotel.

A quick recharge (both for us and our electronics), and we headed out to pick up some metro passes to cover us the next couple of days, and a quick meal at the hotel.

This hotel, BTW, is quite the sight to see. The Historical Sovietsky. I'll snag pics to post tomorrow. But now, it's 9:30PM Moscow time, 12:30PM Chicago time, and we've been up since the previous day. Sleepy time now.

(This post won't make it up until the next morning, as we have no network in the room -- only the lobby.)

Yay, Russia! Tomorrow, we head into Red Square and see all the things Tisha wants to see.