We got up promptly and Jer made breakfast. After showering, we packed up our stuff and got ready to head to into town. We dropped our keys in our hostess's mailbox and walked into town. After opting not to put our luggage in a locker at the Central Station, we did a bit of souvenir shopping at Sweden House. The best thing we didn't buy was a cigarette lighter with two moose that made sweet love (under a red light) when you lit it.
We booked it back to the Central Station and caught the 11:05 Arlanda Express train to the airport. Check-in and security were quick, leaving us plenty of time to buy candy at the duty-free and chat with the passport control agents. One asked Jer how he liked the Swedish girls, to which Jer replied that they were fine but he was traveling with his wife, eliciting laughs from both agents and Jess.
Since we arrived at our gate super-early, we had time to stop at a cafe for lunch. Jer had a feta and olive wrap (which contained more crême fraîche than feta) and Jess had a ham and cheese pizza, and we shared a Fanta. For airport food, it was surprisingly good.
Our flight was decent, though SAS apparently no longer serves complimentary snacks or drinks on its flights (a bottle of water is 3 euros). We were a bit taken aback. Still, we arrived at Moscow's Shermetevo Airport with no problems, breezed through immigration and customs, and met our driver in the Arrivals hall. The drive to our hotel seemed interminable, but actually took about an hour. Along the way, we saw an interesting mix of old and new Russia (both in terms of cars and architecture).
The Holiday Inn Suschevsky is a serviceable, clean hotel, a bit farther from the center than we'd prefer, but right by a metro station. We got checked in to our room (on the top floor), had some tea, then set out to meet friends from NYC who've moved to Moscow. We rode the metro and saw a number of the beautiful stations for which the city is famous, with crystal chandeliers and friezes or mosaics on the walls. We got off at the wrong station at one point, but that ended up being the most beautiful one we saw!
We met our friends outside the Moscow office of Jess's firm and walked to one of their favorite Russian restaurants, Oblomov. They ordered a feast of traditional and new Russian foods. Among the starters we shared were: duck salad (shredded duck, mesclun and a sweetish dressing), beef in aspic, herring with boiled potatoes, cold dilled mushrooms, and meat and cabbage pirozhki (baked dumplings). Then we each had a soup, which were served with sour cream: Jer had okroshka (a fermented barley soup with cucumbers and peppers) and Jess had mushroom soup in a beef broth. For our mains, Jer had roast wild boar with an onion/berry chutney, which was tasty but a bit dry, and Jess had beef and mushrooms in cream sauce, which was very rich (though it was served with pickles to balance it).
We sat around drinking (including a couple of rounds of very good vodka, though mostly we drank mors, a berry juice similar to cranberry) and chatting until 1 am, by which time the subway had stopped running. Our friends hailed us a car and negotiated a fare back to our hotel, asking the driver to take us by Red Square so we could see it lit up at night. The driver did better than that, stopping for 5 minutes so we could run in and take a few pictures of the Kremlin, St. Basil's and GUM. It was a magical sight, we were grateful for the opportunity to see it.
After a bit of map checking, our driver dropped us at our hotel and we fell into bed at 2 am.