Arrived safely

Hello all,

I arrived safely in Salym yesterday-now back online :-)
Sorry about neglecting the blog, still no internet access at home, but that should hopefully be sorted by next time.

Travel over was pretty uneventful, flight to Moscow was doubly enjoyable on BA after 18hours on Thomson planes!! Ditto UTAir business class, though didn't get caviar this time...standards, tut tut...Travelled with Simon, Robert-Jan and a new guy called Luke who will be replacing Murat as a PT. Arrived quite late in Surgut as usual, only managed to sleep 1 hour before getting on the train. The train journey took 6 hours this time, one of which was spent sitting in a random village for no apparent reason...building the tracks maybe. Managed to get some sleep though luckily.

Yesterday evening Simon and I drove up to pad 16, which is the new location for rig 4...I feel like I've arrived back home :-)
Luckily there was nothing on last night so had an early night. It was nice seeing people here again at dinner and this morning. The canteen has completely changed-it is brand new and much bigger; the interaction with the cooks is slightly different as food needs to ordered through a window rather than being able to walk into the kitchen so I am rather glad that the one thing I master in Russian is food!!

Did a CEL job this morning, nothing too exciting, a rather unhelpful Russian crew so I had to put my foot down and get answers (in Russian-all good..hmmm) but nothing much else. Pasha (DSV) is well and stressed (as usual) because he has new toolpushers who are inexperienced and taking ages to do everything, so no drilling till tonight. Now is a good time for us to catch up on what's been happening...

More later. I have a bunch of posts I want to write about time off, which will come in below this one...