Travel Notes

Travel Briefs

Transaero in LA

Russian private airline Transaero has tapped into the US market with a new Moscow-Los Angeles route. Three leased 290-seat DC-1030s will be used for the non-stop, 12-hour weekly flights. Passengers will arrive in Moscow at Sheremetyevo-I airport, where they can transfer directly to Transaero’s domestic and CIS flights with a 2-5 hour stopover. In October, the company will start flights to Orlando (Florida) where its Russian competitor Aeroflot failed to garner passengers because of a poorly organized marketing campaign. Routes to Chicago and Seattle will follow.

AIDS test arrives

The long-feared HIV test requirement for foreigners on long trips to Russia is finally beginning to be implemented. Some Russian consulates, notably in New York and London, say that in June they started demanding test results from people applying for visas for three months or longer. Others, such as Paris and Ottawa, said that AIDS tests were still not required to obtain visas, but that certificates would need to be shown by visitors when they reached the Russian border. Passed over a year ago, the law on AIDS testing has drawn heavy criticism from Western diplomats and international health experts, who see it as an ineffective way of combatting the disease. Until recently, bureaucratic and technical problems had seemed to make its full implementation unlikely.

Russian Lizards in NJ

The much heralded Great Russian Dinosaurs exhibit (see Russian Life, June 1996) will move from Iowa city, IA to Trenton, NJ this fall. The show will open September 21 and run through December 22 at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. The museum is home to the first, nearly-complete dinosaur skeleton found anywhere in the world and will be the last US site for the Russian Dinosaurs exhibit, before it returns to Moscow.

18-hour bank opens

Visitors frustrated by the lack of late-working currency exchange points in Moscow can now find relief underground. MontazhSpetsBank has opened a branch in the Prospekt Mira metro station. It works the same hours as the metro, from 6 am to 1 am. The vast majority of banks in the city, including those situated in the metro, close by 8 pm.