Back in Moscow

It's late Friday evening. Sleeping Beauty and her assistant are in bed. I'm not tired (rarely am), so I went out to play. I stopped by the Pochta (Post Office) and got some Russian stamps for future correspondence. I had blini for dinner, and bought a new book. I had a latte (oh how I miss Peets), and did my blog.

The various housekeeping tasks of the adoption have kept me so busy that I don't have time to make Blog entries. What does it mean when the activity gets in the way of writing about the activity? I've been further hampered by poor internet access in Moscow, and I even LOST a post. It was my best - by far. I'll try and re-post the information, but I fear that magical prose is lost forever.

After our day off in Kemerovo, we flew to Moscow. It was a 3 hour 45 minute flight, and we lost 4 time zones. So we landed in Moscow BEFORE we took off from Kemerovo. Modern technology make such weirdness possible.

In Moscow, we started with a Doctor's appointment for Dasha. Each child has to be checked out, and cleared for entry into the US. We then went to the US embassy to get her an Immigrant Visa into the US, plus an application for Citizenship. She will become a US citizen the minute she sets foot on US soil. Given our flights, I suppose she will technically be a Seattlite.

The adjustment has been hard for Dasha. She was worn out from the long flight and all the paperwork. We had a break at our hotel before the embassy visit, and she was unwilling to leave the hotel and head for the embassy. I had to pick her up to get her out of the Hotel room. Once underway she was cooperative. But it's obvious that all this is overwhelming.

Here's the quintessential Russian Adoption photo. It took a surprisingly long time to find some one to take our picture. I often offer to take other people's picture for them (with their camera), but that seemed to be an odd offer to most folks here. We finally found a guy from Oklahoma who took this shot of us.

Major streets don't have crosswalks on the surface. Instead you descend into an underground tunnel called a Perihod. They have small kiosk shops, and often a Metro entrance. This was a particularly nice entrance.

In this Perihod we found a guy selling bootleg copies of DVDs. We bought 1 DVD with Garry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (they don't have a soft H in Russian), and two other DVDs which EACH have 10 videos on them, things like Shrek 1 and 2, Madagascar, really recent stuff. Each DVD was $5. We thought it might be nice for Dasha to have a few videos in Russian during the early transition at home.

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