Hello from Russia

I send many greetings to all after more than year gap. Many interesting things happen meantime, but there is no time and space for writing all of them. But about one I will tell you as I sucessfully returned from my second trip to Russia.

We had started works on implementing the greatest ERP system ever (SAP) for our Russian partly sister- and partly subsidiary-company in the last months of year 2006. Nevertheless, our colleagues from mother-company made the whole thing a little bit easier, I have to admit, but the time was heavily extended. But not to write only about work. We have arrived with signed fine concepts and as far I think it will have a right direction now.

We have been to Russia for two weeks this time. The whole weekend we spent in Moscow and I have to say I really looked forward to it. In Kaluga, we just work from sunrise to sunset and see nothing. Yes, we have been to some space museum there, but... Moscow is Moscow! It is amazing how wide streets (6 lanes in one direction and 6 in the other) can be so overcrowded. And the style of their driving - not like in India - I would say in India the traffic was chaotic at the first glance, but after some time you can see that Indians drive carefully. Russians do not care about other drivers at all. We had a former mafian driver (I only guess but if you see, you will agree) - he was able to move from the most right lane to the most left one in 100 km/h speed on really crowded road may be even faster than me on the same road without any other car - he needed just 70 metres, may be less - it was aweful.

During the weekend, we have visited Krasnaya Plotschad (Red Square), Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Russian Historic Museum and -of course- Moscow Subway (Metro). Everything was (of course) amazing, I like sightseeing very much, but most I liked metro :-) Its architecture was really different to any subway I know from western Europe. It was bigger (as everything in Russia), larger (as everything in Russia) and more fancy (not as everything in Russia). I will try to post some photos, but I guess everybody knows.

One last thing I found out about Russian by own eyeball - they drink a lot. Even young women. One example for all - we waited for one of our colleague near an exit from the subway. Than young pretty woman came out of the subway (we are only men, of course we noticed :-) ). Suddenly, she fell down with hands next to her body and face to the ground. It seemed really teribbly, I thought she would be heavily injured. After few seconds, she just stood up and continued with her walk. Nothing happened to her just some little dirt on her clothes - she was only drunk.

As for the weather, in Moscow it was OK for west-Europeans (the temperature was around zero) but the previous week in Kaluga... oh :-) it was down to minus 25 degrees of Celsius (and this is really cold for me!!!). I was really freezing just while going from the pub to the hotel and it was less than 5 minutes :-)

Have a nice day, I will write something more next time.