Touching Down in Bashkortostan

The homey little Ufa airport is lit up with World Junior posters. In terms of popularity, the KHL is a distant second to Russian national teams. The Russians U-20 squad has brought home a gold and silver the last 2 years on the narrow North American ice, so dreams of gold abound in Mother Russia, feeding a hockey fever that should spill over in the Sochi Winter Games in 13 months.

A quick geography note: Ural Mountains are the unofficial boundary of Europe and Asia, Ufa is on the western edge of the Urals, so technically we are still in Europe, probably the most Eastern city in Europe, and a lot of the locals all look a bit Asian. Spectacular people watching.

There are about a half dozen cities all lined up on the same latitude at the western edge of the Urals, but Ufa is probably the biggest in population at 1.2 M (about the size of Boston).  Oil and coal extraction makes this place tick, and the local hockey team won the KHL championship in 2010, so it's a good hockey town.  According to our translator there is one frozen lake for pond hockey, which I hope to locate tomorrow.

So Aeroflot lost one of two bags belonging to my travel partner Rob Simpson, and they sequestered him and the TSN translator I brought in for half an hour. He was filling out paperwork and pleading with the bureaucrats like it was 1979...I had nothing to do, so I stepped outside to sample the 25 below clear air.  Did the appropriate cough, and then tried to get back in, Cop told me NYET NYET NYET, so I had to scoot around and clear security again, luckily my bags were where I left em.

We flew along a latitude line about even with Newfoundland on the shortest day of the year, traveled 4900 miles.  Saw a sunset, a sunrise and another sunset as we and that shrunken orb were heading fast in different directions. Sprinted past each other near Moscow about halfway up to the arctic circle.  TSN guys we saw in the lobby said at 10 AM it is still pitch dark.  Gotta find another source of vitamin D I guess.