On December 26th 2003, my plane landed at Sheremetyevo airport.
A dear reunion ensued; two years earlier, I had been studying for one semester at Moscow State University, and many fond memories are tied to the streets and metro lines of this wonderful city.

This time my road brought me here, as I was joining two friends from Romania - Mihai and Gusti - on their trip to Siberia. As neither of them speaks any Russian, my translating and 'fixing' skills were quite welcome.

With my secret KGB insider contacts, I arranged for us to stay at the student's dorm of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI) in the small town Dolgoprudnii outside Moscow.
This institute has, by the way, the largest local network in the world, and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records for this fact.

On the same day as I arrived, I tried to go register my visa at a travel agent, like a good girl. But as soon as the clerk saw my address of residence in Russia - Dolgoprudnii - she said that it was impossible, as I wasn't staying in *Moscow*, but in *Moskovskaya oblast'*,
the vicinities of Moscow. 
Okay, so she could not register me. But what should I do then? 
She didn't recommend registering with the police in Dolgoprudnii, but just said that I should have to be without registration.
Well, but will that be okay? - If the police don't stop you and ask for your documents, it'll be all right.
(Oh well, no one ever stopped me last time, so I hoped that no one would this time, either.)
My Romanian friends, on the other hand, didn't have any problems whatsoever. Thanks to the privilege of being citizens of a formerly Communist state, their visas cost only 2 bucks, and no registering was needed ...

After a day or two of having fun with our new friends at the MFTI dorm, who happily insisted on showing us around the Red Square and the area around the Kremlin before we left, we caught an eastbound flight ... to Siberia!

The humble photographer obviously found St. Basil's cathedral (whose renovation is almost done now) to be much more interesting than the people posing in the foreground. Still, the people are, from left to right, Gusti, Mihai, a student from MFTI whose name I can't recall - despite the fact that his Russian male pride forced him to carry my rucksack for me, and, finally, Seryozha from MFTI. Kolya, our third companion from the institute, was apparently too fascinated by the fact that I had a real Russian Zenit camera to go pose in the picture ...

The Stalinist Skyscraper at Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya.