What the? Brisbane.!!!

Over 60 years ago Winston Churchill said "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," and sitting here back in Brisbane, Australia I couldn't agree more.
What a whirlwind last 24 hours. One minute I'm planning the next day's classes the next I'm on a plane, getting the hell out of Dodge.
It all started two days ago when I had to extend my registration. I had a flight booked to come back to Australia for the 12th, however my registration expired on the 1st. This presented a problem as for some reason I was finding it difficult to find a company to prolong the registration. With nowhere else to turn I asked my well connected father in-law for a hand and thought all would be fine and dandy. However, in Russia fine and dandy equates to #*#* yourself scared!
Tolya returned with an unusually glum look on his face. The puppet master couldn't pull any strings and so there was a problem! I would have to go to the head honcho of registrations and plead my case. The problem itself is still, as I sit here in Brisbane, rather confusing to account and one day I will write a detailed description of the full dilemma.
After a solid berating from the head honcho, it was understood that an imminent departure was in need. That, or a 400 00o Ruble fine and a 5 year ban from the country! What followed was absolute bedlam. A ticket was booked, amazingly for 5.30pm the next day, but before getting on the plane I had to make a trip back to the head honcho and discuss and finalise some "paperwork". The use of the word "paperwork" in Russia covers a range of topics, situations, bookwork sensitive issues, etc.... Can't go into it all right now.
The catch was that the Honcho only worked between 2-4pm and I had to be at the airport at 3.30pm. Vlad's airport, by the way, is an hour out of town. So, in effect I had half an hour to see this woman , organise my mess and 'hare-tail it' to the airport. It was going to be close but I was quietly confident as I had backup in the form of Nastya, the director from EF another Nastya and Tolya. Nastya the director and I had attempted, on the off chance, to intercept the Honcho out of her work hours at 9 that morning, to no avail. And so re arriving outside the building 2 hours before opening we felt sure we would be first in line. That was until, we saw a little Kazakh man, holding a piece of cardboard from a chocolate box. "Is there a queue?"we asked. His answer was brutal as he passed over the empty chocolate box. To our horror the innocuous box had on it a list of people waiting to talk to the Honcho and we were 12th in line. My world came crashing in upon me. This was it, I would never make it top the airport! Visions of Russian prisons flashed through my mind. Enter Super Tolya!!
Swinging into action my father-in-law, like a man possessed, began interrogating everyone in his vicinity. It didn't take long, but before we knew it, he had made "friends" with the cleaner and was unbelievably, inside the building talking to the authorities. The rest is history and I'm still very confused over what actually happened, but as we left the the registration building the big high five to the cleaner spoke volumes!
After a mad dash to the airport I had made it. A little frazzled and a few more gray hairs, but I made it on board without any incident.