"
First come, first served."
Sheremetyevo Airport is the main
airport serving the city of
Moscow. Others include
Zukhovsky,
Domodedovo,
Vnukovo and
Bykovo. Sheremetyevo has 2
terminals, with terminal 1 serving
domestic flights, and terminal 2 serving
international flights. Sheremetyevo-2 is the only airport in Moscow with flights to non-
CIS countries. Until the
USSR was disbanded, Sheremetyevo was the only airport in Moscow that non-
Soviet citizens were allowed to use.
Being Moscow's international
gateway, Sheremetyevo is the greeting that most
tourists encounter when visiting
Russia. It does a pretty poor (or good, depending on your
point of view) job of this. The airport was built in
1959, given a
minor update for the
1980 Olympics and has not changed much since then. It is old,
dilapidated and offers few
creature comforts, save for numerous
vodka dispensing machines. There are 19 gates in the International Terminal, and space for 31 more aircraft on the
apron.
Western-style
crowd control measures are rarely used, and so migrating through the terminal becomes an exercise in
lemming-emulation. This process is best approached as one would tackle a
decathalon. First out of the plane means first to the customs desk. This is good as there may only be one desk open, even though five planes have landed in the past half hour. Here, numerous bureaucratic hoops must be jumped through, many of which are not documented. Customs officials rarely stamp the papers they are supposed to, so the prepared tourist must be both
observant and
insistent. Once past customs, being first is again important to ensure that one's bags are not stolen off the
carousel before one can reach them. Luckily this is rarely an issue, as bags may take several
hours to traverse the
mysterious belly of the terminal. Hopefully, if / when bags have been collected, the tourist will have enough
stamina to
run the gauntlet of the
taxi stand.
Fittingly enough, my most poignant memory of my
sojourn to Sheremetyevo is being crushed against the wall by a
raging horde of passengers when they threw open the door to the departure gate, and called the Russian equivalent of "
All aboard!"
Sheremetyevo's
Airport Code is
SVO. It is situated about 18 miles northwest of Moscow
city center on the
Leningradsky Prospekt (also called the
M-10).