Mission To Moscow Joins The Mile-High Club

It is with great joy that I announce that Mission to Moscow has gone sky-high! That's right. This blog is now being introduced in in-flight magazines!

In October the Russian airline Aeroflot featured an article in their in-flight magazine about inter-cultural marriages, and Mission To Moscow was featured and quoted in this article. Fittingly, I was the last to know about it.

The new hits to this blog skyrocketed and I received over 100 emails. For the past few weeks I couldn't figure out where all this traffic was coming from, until I walked into Language Link for my first Russian language class.

It was a strange feeling, returning to the school I taught so many English classes but this time as a student. Many of my colleagues were still there, sitting in the staff room, and I exchanged banter with them but felt uncomfortable crossing the threshold from the hallway into the room. After all, I am no longer a teacher at this company. Some were surprised to see me return and others not so interested. For me, it was nice to see everyone again, particularly Gem who joined me for a few beers at Kruzhka last week.

It was the Russian administrators of the school, however, who not only seemed very happy to see me again (I always had fun conversations with them), but treated me as a minor celebrity. Then one of them pulled out the Aeroflot article with my picture and my blog in it. "What on earth?" I queried myself. Suddenly, all the traffic and emails began to make sense.

When I got home I opened the ate_the_paint@live.ca email account and began reading through all the messages. Many of them were none too flattering (not everyone shares my sense of humour), but three of them stood out. Those were requests for articles about Moscow from competitor in-flight magazines!

Naturally I responded positively and then opened Word to begin pounding out Pulitzer-Prize worthy articles, but instead I sat there staring at the blinking cursor. I actually don't have anything to write about! In the end I sent off a few manuscripts concerning points of interest in Moscow and general advice about travelling here...you know, the same old stuff you can find in any travel guide. Two of the three airlines accepted them and I'm still waiting to hear from the third.

After nearly two years of sharing personal experiences, drunken ramblings, historical analysis and plain stupid entertainment, I'm finally making money with this blog (something I stumbled into and didn't set out to do). Who knew there was such a market with in-flight magazines? Mission To Moscow has joined the mile-high club! Now, if only its author could do the same...