Sheremetyevo-2: back to life.

It hasn’t been a month since I was last in China – and here I am back again already! This time though it’s not on a business trip; far from it. It’s one of my traditional vacation tours of China’s lesser-known natural-and-meditative beauty offerings, followed by my inevitable tales-and-pics from PRC-side for all of my dear readers )…

Before I kick off though, a +1 to the long-neglected – but not forgotten – #dz-information tag. “What’s that?” you ask? It’s when my regular travel companion (since something like the year dot) – DZ – puts fingers to keyboard for, as the tag suggests, an important informational bulletin. All righty. Reins being duly passed over…

For those heading over to China who live a long way away from Moscow (for example, in Kaliningrad), Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport (SVO) first needs getting to. And sometimes the time from landing there and then flying onward to China on a connecting flight can be real long – sometimes necessitating staying overnight in one of the hotels by the airport. I say “sometimes”, but the last time I did stay there overnight was pre-covid. Now, you might have thought that, post-covid, the airport would have returned to normal; however, it didn’t. Things stayed subdued. Then the geopoliticisms hit and all the Western airlines stopped flying to and from SVO. Add to that the fact that the eastern destinations/arrivals all switched to the newly-built Terminal C, and the result was that the southern complex (today made up of Terminals D, E, and F – the latter formerly known as Sheremetyevo-2; confused?!) was temporarily closed.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2024, and I can report that life has returned! At least, that is, to the southern complex’s Terminal D (for example, Terminal D now serves all flights of Pobeda). Ok, I won’t say the place is busy, but at least it’s open, which is a promising start. And anyway – a quiet airport is some much most pleasant than a busy one, right? And near-empty carriages of underground inter-terminal shuttle-trains (like the one that took me to the Radisson Cosmos Selection Hotel) are of course so much more pleasant than full ones too ->

The hotel was a lot busier than the terminals. I had to wait a good 10 minutes checking in in line behind the scores of other transferring passengers and lots of Chinese crew; in the past I remember two minutes. At midnight the restaurant had guests in it, and at breakfast it took me a while to find a free table. Another observation – plenty of the staff at the hotel were Turkish. And another: judging by their websites, other hotels here – like the Novotel, Sheraton, Holiday Inn Express and Park Inn – are also real busy.

In closing, a few photos of SVO’s southern terminals ->