ChrisMerriman.com

I am going to be posting a few pictures over the next couple of days that have been sitting on my hard drive waiting to be published. Why the apology to (Ira’s) Aunty Sasha? She complained mentioned that I hadn’t posted photos of Anna for a while, and there only seemed to be pictures of kittens and minced beef on the front page 🙂 I imagine the post previous to this will not excite her a great deal either. Anyway, once the miscellaneous photos are published, I’ll move onto Anna’s once more.

Tags: Irina

… or kidnapped, beaten or dumped in the middle of nowhere. To be honest, this did not make that particular Friday and different from most days of the week, it was just that had circumstances been a little different, I might have felt it was going that way. Let me skip back a few hours to paint the scene. I went over to our flat, from the in-laws’ place, to feed our cats and make sure everything was OK. Having caught a taxi there (there is little to no passing traffic in Chubary), I flagged someone down on Turan, just in front of our flat, to get back to Irina and Anna. I explained where I wanted to go, and the driver confirmed it wasn’t out of his way too much. All fine so far…
We turned left at one junction, drove down a little more, to the last major crossroads before the road led to Ira’s parents’ house. There was a fair amount of stationary traffic – I don’t know if they were digging the road up, there was a motorhome breakdown blocking two lanes, or perhaps a VIP was passing in one of four directions in the next twenty minutes (obviously necessitating a policeman to turn off the traffic lights and direct all vehicles by hand). Anyway, the driver (a nice old man), turned to his wife in the back and they seemed to agree that waiting in the queue would take too long. No problem, he turns off right in the filter lane and motions that he will do a U-turn and approach the same junction from a different, less congested direction. However, given the width of the road, the double unbroken white lines in the middle, and no one wanting to use the pedestrian crossing further down the road (the next less illegal area to turn), we had to drive right down the road, getting further and further away from our destination. Eventually we manage to turn around, and he soon discovers that the traffic is too much to bare in this direction as well. We turn around once more, this time using a parallel side road, and attempt to enter Chubary from the rear. (You, yes you at the back, STOP sniggering now). However, as we enter the district from a road I’ve never seen, much less travelled before, I have no idea where we are. Nor does he. Or his wife. We now end up taking a twenty minute detour that leads us virtually over to the Left Bank, and it is at this point that I’d probably have got a little nervous if the driver and passenger were two dodgy looking blokes, as we’d spent a long time driving round, and were now heading in completely the wrong direction, into an area of town that I know not very well.
Anyway, as you may have guessed by the post title, and the fact I am here writing this, I got home eventually, much to my, and the driver’s relief. Next time I’ll just ask a driver to stick in the queue, or walk the last part, if they don’t seem clued in as to local short cuts 🙂

Tags: Irina