Well, I made it. And with minimal bureaucratic nightmares or anal-probing. I attended the welcome dinner last night, where the American team (as well as the other guests of the team and Nick Baxter, the team captain) seemed more than willing — enthusiastic, even — to “talk puzzles” with me. That’s the good news.
Here’s the bad news:
- My flight out of JFK was delayed by 90 minutes, which was exactly the amount of time of my connection, so I spent most of the first 12 hours of the trip freaking out that I would have to spend the following night roaming the streets of Kiev, Ukraine, waiting for the next flight to Minsk. Fortunately, Aerosvit’s (“Ukrainian Airlines”) pilot made up about an hour in the air (which made me wonder, as Seinfeld once quipped, Why don’t they always make up an hour in the air??…), so I made it to Ukraine with plenty of time to catch the connecting flight. My luggage, however, was not as fortunate, and I was forced to spend my first night here without dental- or armpit-hygiene products.
- I couldn’t sleep on the flights, and so I arrived not only jeg-lagged but sleep-deprived. I set my wake-up call for 9:00 a.m. (no alarm clock in the room) and, figuring 10-11 hours of sleep would be enough to catch up, went to bed around 10:00 for the first time since maybe junior high. Next thing I know, it’s 10:30 and I’ve missed breakfast. Apparently wake-up calls from high-end Belarussian hotels neither call nor wake up.
- Fast-forward one hour. I arrive in the lobby for the WPC-organized 12 o’clock field trip to a local farm (“lunch and dinner in tradition Belarus folk style!”) to discover that they apparently decided, extempore, to move the trip up an hour; no one called me to let me know. According to Lonely Planet, “If you only make one day trip from Minsk, let this be the one.” Great. Even worse, I was planning to use the outing — the only extended period of relaxation in the WPC schedule — as my best opportunity for informal interviews and eavesdropping.
- I called the airline to recover my luggage. No dice. Call again tomorrow, she says, mostly in Russian.
- And so, here I am, in the lobby of the Hotel “Belarus” (as they endearingly punctuate it), blogging to you from a laptop that has 9 minutes left of battery time, and with my volt-converter in a suitcase that may or may not be on a runway in Kiev somewhere.
Thus, no time for further updates. No time for new Puzzles of the Day or answers to old ones. No time for anything other than:
More to come tomorrow. Perhaps.
