Judy Carter: Story - "My Trip to Russia"

It really is hard to believe that anyone would allow a twelve year old kid to travel half way around the world alone, but it happened to me. It wasn't planned that way. I was supposed to join my mom and dad at the LaGuardia airport and then we were all going to fly together from there. My parents' flight was delayed and the plane had taken off before I could scream bloody murder, get me off this thing. I've lost my parents. The airline attendant attempted to reassure me that Pelto airlines could locate my parents and insure that we met up once I arrived in Moscow. The airlines had already lost my parents one time and yet they expected me to believe that they were omnificent. I didn't buy it and I was nowhere close to being reassured. I have traveled a fair amount for a kid so I am used to flying and I know how to work the radio, how to maneuver in the restroom and how to signal the attendant. If I had had a credit card, I could have called Grandma and filled her in on my dilemma. But I didn't have a credit card. I was just hoping that this was not an omen of how this trip was going to go. I like to think I am pretty grown up for my age but I wanted my parents. It was hard to keep the tears at bay. Every time an announcement was made in a foreign language, I panicked. I'd listen as hard as I could for the English version before I could convince myself to relax.

The sun never really set. We were treated to this non-stop sunset throughout most of the trip. I must have fallen asleep at some point because as we approached our destination, it was daylight and the sunset was gone. How weird. I was wishing I could remember enough about the earth's rotation and all to explain this, but I couldn't.

Oh, yeah. Why am I taking this trip anyway? My Russian pen pal, Sasha, wrote a letter to President Clinton. It must have been some letter because I got a phone call from the President of the United States asking me if I would like to go visit Sasha in Moscow, accompanied by my parents, of course. I knew Sasha was intelligent and clever but this took the cake.

The airline attendant introduced me to some Russian university students on the plane. The students made it clear to me that I would not be abandoned at the airport in Moscow. The students worked out a plan to get me through customs and to Sasha's home and to also take care of my parents once they arrived. I would soon find out that this was a sample of Russian hospitality. I had counted on this from Sasha but not from utter strangers. I no longer worried about the airlines not assisting me-I didn't need them any more.

We arrived in Moscow around 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday. I had left my home town at 7:00 a.m. Monday. What a long flight and so disorienting with the 11 hour time difference.

The bus ride into town was about an hour and a half long. I was astonished to see billboards in both Russian and English. It made me relax a little bit. The landscape reminded me of my grandmother's home in Indiana-flat with lots of trees and sort of dreary. No big blue sky where you can see forever like where I'm from. After riding for about 25 minutes, I realized there were no houses anywhere. As we got closer to town, I saw huge apartment buildings, but no suburban housing areas like we have outside our cities in the U.S. How strange!
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My new friends were true to their word. Two of them accompanied me right to Sasha's door. The plane my parents were on was scheduled to arrive later that night and some of the students were going to go back and meet them and deliver them to me at Sasha's. Little did I know at that point that my parents would never make it to Moscow.

Sasha's family was well off financially by Russian standards. They owned a car and had another flat right in town. But by U.S. standards, Sasha and his family lived quite simply. It was just Sasha, his brother, Yori and his parents. They lived in one of those huge, ugly apartment buildings. Sasha and Yori shared a small bedroom and his parents had a bedroom and then there was a little living room and a tiny kitchen. The bathroom was this minuscule room, probably 4 by 4 feet and then there was another room the same size right next to it with the sink. They had a little balcony about the same size as our car and that was it. If this was a wealthy family's home, I could hardly imagine what kind of a place your average Russian lived in. The garage was called a shell because it was this metal box shaped kind of like a big clam shell and that was the way it opened up to drive the car in. A large car would never fit in these things. What did they do? Get a new car, get a new garage? Actually, Sasha told me that they kept their cars forever. When you figure it was a sign of a certain level of wealth to even have a car, it makes sense.

Around nine o'clock that first night, my parents called me at Sasha's home. Misfortune was to be their friend again. Dad developed signs of the flu before they had even left home and in his maligned state, he left their carry-on baggage on their first flight and away went their passports. They could not even leave the United States. Which in the end was for the best. Dad had to have his appendix removed within 24 hours and that was most certainly not something to go through in Russia. They had been frantic when they first discovered that I had gone onto Moscow without them but were convinced I was in good hands once they had spoken with my new[found university friends from the plane ride. These students had contacted my folks after being informed by the airlines that they never even left the U.S. Talk about guardian angels. So there I was in Russia for two weeks without another American anywhere close at hand. I was so lucky that Sasha could speak English as well as he did. There were times when we couldn't figure out what the other person was trying to say, but it didn't happen that often. Imagine trying to learn to read a foreign language when the alphabet is not even the same. Words could be written upside down and I couldn't even tell it sometimes. Needless to say, I learned very little Russian. I could say the first place Sasha took me the following day was to Red Square and I will never forget the overwhelming feeling I had standing in the middle of it surrounded by such beauty and grandeur and history.
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