SAMARA: Standing in the media centre of Samara Arena, Oleg Kononenko breaks into a smile when he learns that there are Indians in the room. Do you know that the only border that can be seen from space is that between India and Pakistan? At night, the border is lit by security lights, and you can see it pretty clearly,” he says.
Of course, Kononenko knows what he is talking about. He has spent a whopping 533 nights inside the International Space Station.
And, only in Samara will you find an active cosmonaut loitering around a World Cup venue. It's called the Space Capital of Russia, after all.
Samara was once the centre of the space race between the Soviet Union and US. The city, though, wasn't called Samara back then; it had been renamed Kuybyshev, after a close associate of Stalin.
The Soviets always had big plans for this city. It was designated as the second capital in case Moscow fell to Nazis during World War II. A special bunker was built for Stalin in the city, one that now exists as a tourist attraction.
After their worst fears didn't materialise, the Soviets turned the city into the centre of their space programme on January 2, 1958. A lot of the required infrastructure was already in place due to the war, when Samara supplied planes and ammunition.
After the war, Stalin closed the city off. It is said that boats on the nearby stretch of Volga were permitted only at night so that people wouldn't stumble upon the city.
It was in Samara that the rocket that carried Yuri Gagarin — the first man to escape Earth's orbit — was made.
Those days might be long gone, but memories have been preserved at Samara Cosmos Museum. At its entrance is a huge, real model of the Soyuz launch vehicle. The rocket was made in Samara in 1984 and served as a training module at Plasetsk Spaceport. It was handed over to the city during the 80th-anniversary celebrations of Samara's Progress Rocket Space Centre. Inside the museum lie more marvellous relics.
There are two models of the Resource F1 landing vehicle; both had made the trip to outer-space and back. One even has significant charring on one side, burns sustained during re-entry. Next to it is a space suit used by cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Sergei Zaletin during the last-ever mission to Soviet space-station Mir. Holding the suit in place is the actual seat from their spacecraft.
But, the museum's centre-stage is a relic of Soviet Union's secretive intelligence programme: the Yantar-2k landing module, which was used as a spy satellite.
Visitors can not only view the food that cosmonauts have in space, they can also buy a tube and sample it for a few hundred roubles.
As is the case with most things in Samara, the museum too has been modified for the World Cup. The top floor is an exhibition dedicated to links between space and football: how Adidas got the name Telstar from a satellite, and pictures of Gagarin playing football.
But the influence of Samara's cosmological past on the World Cup doesn't stop there.
The Samara Arena itself has been modelled on a giant spacecraft; a nod to the city's past among the stars.