I've not really seen the 1991 Krzysztof Kieslowski film but I sometimes do feel like Véronique, shall we say en ménant une double vie. At least that's how it seems with the long days my Inessa and I lead. There's work of course, and there's l'après-travaille.
For tonight's adventure, Dearie and I -to use a Rushdieism- prettified ourselves (she her new dress, me my Sammy 'n' Jimmy suit) for a BCBG soirée with Moscow's zamechatelnie lyudi. That was at least how the PR people for the event, dubbed Terra Cognita, billed it. Inessa met her photographer, Zhenya, at the Gubernatorsky fusion resto on Vosnesensky for the media orientation.
The idea was to follow the media bus to the party venue -Shore House, a restaurant, summer patio and yacht club somewhere off the Moscow Ring Road (MKAD) on Leningradskoe Shosse. Party was scheduled to start at 8, Zhenya was supposed to take photos while my pet and I wined, dined and hobnobbed with the overly-slash-almost bearably pretentious cream of Moscow's crème for a couple of hours before calling it a wrap at around 10, to be in Oktyabrskoye Pole just in time for that elusive call from Inessa's parents. 
That was before we fell afoul of the Law - Murphy's in particular.After circling several blocks for more than 40 minutes to get back to a spot just 300 meters from the original point of departure we realised what kind of jam we were into: one that stretched, bumper-to-bumper, from Pushkin Square to Aeroport. The entire time we couldn't stray too far from the media bus, where Anna The PR Coordinator (a.k.a. The Meal Ticket) was.
From gremlins in the car stereo to being in the wrong lane all the time, the slow procession turned from merely tedious to excruciating. Worse, my bladder felt like the Aswan Dam during the Nilean high tide. To keep from thinking about anything liquid I had to resort to this Lane-Change Meter game I used to play a lot during the awful chronic traffic jams of 1990-1992 back home. At least the last time I was in traffic this bad, I was also with my Inessa: it was the Victory Day weekend in May, when we basically kept each other company on my overnight trip to Ivanovo by SMS and she to her dacha in a village along the Rybinsk Reservoir. 
Just as then, Inessa was also very upbeat and supportive this time even though she had to go herself. Yes, things could have definitely been worse. Yet to survive the experience I had to make a pit stop at the mall at the U-bahn station in Aeroport.We finally got to our destination at around 9:40 pm, 2 hours and a half since we took off from City Hall. What's more, this Shore House was actually just in the Crocus City grounds, 66 km on MKAD. Had we known we could've taken an alternate route without waiting for the media bus! Arggggh. At least the worst was over.
Once at the party we started enjoying ourselves more. The food wasn't anything to write home about, but the place itself deserved its billing. There was a stage constructed on water, a breezy patio, an open bar and a full programme awaiting us. In fact we were rather fortunate: the quality of the evening was going to take a distinctly sharp upturn. As you can see here in photos taken by Zhenya, Moscow's party crowd was out in full force.
Even the sudden chill -not exactly unusual in Moscow in midsummer, although very few people, in their cocktail party dresses, were actually read for it- failed to put a damper on the party, which included performances by Igor Butman and Nino Katamadze. There were also free rides on the yachts moored on the river out back. There were also Ferrari and Porche street races on the lot between Shore House and the Crocus Expo Centre.Of course for the best part of the evening, neither Butman or Katamadze had a hand in it. Blame my Inessa. Let's just say l'après-party was better than the party. Ukh davno bylo.
