I left Vladimir on an train bound for Moscow in the evening of Dec. 22. My flight was at 5:55am the next day, so I took the last train from Moscow to the airport and waited there a few hours until check-in time for my flight. I managed to get a little sleep even. 

My first flight was to Vienna, and I flew the German airline Air Berlin. I was instantly amazed: The flight attendants smiled and didn't act like I was a burden to them! How un-Russian. We landed in Vienna at 5:50am (somehow there are five minutes of my life that vanished into some strange black hole of jet lag and time zones), and I was also very impressed with the Vienna airport--everything is clean, the people seem to take their jobs seriously, and the whole place is very efficiently designed. Trying to find what gate your plane will depart from at the Moscow airport is almost impossible--there are no screens that display that information until you have already selected which terminal's security checkpoint to go through, at which point it's already too late. Talk about bad design. Vienna's airport almost gave too much information, with directional signs and screens everywhere. 

After a four-hour layover that I spent sitting at Starbucks, I boarded my plane to Rome. I noticed people's style of dress: Everyone was dressed fashionably and yet somehow differently--the polar opposite of Russia, where there is a fairly standard and pretty unfashionable uniform of dress for men and women. And things were getting exciting--in two hours I would be in Rome! 

Waiting for my train out of Vladimir.