Editor’s Letter: Pull back the Curtain

By Anton Popov,

Star Cruiser Co-Editor,

Star Riders Russia

On April, 19 I came back home to Moscow from a business trip to South Korea. I was scheduled to arrive three days earlier, but was delayed by the eruption of the volcano in Iceland (I could never spell it’s name and it is so long it does not even fit into the copy/paste buffer J). So I spent three days hopping between airports: Seoul, Beijing, Abu Dhabi and Cairo as the organizers of this trip did their best to get us home. Flights to Moscow were cancelled one by one, airports were in complete chaos, people were confused and annoyed…

I love travelling, but for various reasons this was one of the few occasions I wanted to get home ASAP. Still, after a while I decided to stop being nervous and to use this unique opportunity to watch so many people in a difficult situation. There they were: Americans and Arabs, Japanese and Chinese, Russians and Nigerians… All packed in the airport halls, all trapped in uncertainty, starving, thirsty, sleeping on the terminal floors next to each other…

The thing that stunned me most was that all these absolutely different people handled this mess in an absolutely similar way. They learned to be good neighbors, to be polite and helpful even when they could hardly understand each other’s languages. “I lived most of my life behind the Iron Curtain”, my Grandfather told me one day. – “But you, boy, are so lucky”. Indeed, there is more than the Soviet Iron Curtain at work most of the time. Curtains stronger than iron lie deep inside our minds: pride and prejudice, blame and disbelief… you name it. Seeing those curtains break, even under tough circumstances, makes me feel real lucky. Because global family is what we are – be it ISRA or a crowd of tired people in the airport terminal.

Let us just remember that.