Hello from Moscow! We arrived safely this morning (10:40 a.m. Moscow time).   It sure was strange looking out the windows of the airplane as we were landing and seeing nothing but white.   There were a number of other adopting families on our flight including our old CHI friends, Ward & Lynn who sat just 2 rows ahead of us.   They’re in Russia for their court date this week. Lynn seemed reluctantly thrilled at the prospect of being featured on our blog.



We made it through Customs with only a minor glitch.   I had joked to Rob prior to leaving that he’d be lucky to make it through customs since his passport photo is several years old and he is about 140 lbs. lighter and now has a goatee.   Sure enough, he was detained and a second Customs Official came out and scrutinized his identity.   Luckily, his profile & eyes still matched up so they let him through.

After passing through Customs, our bags were waiting for us and our translator/driver Pasche was standing ready to greet us.   We had felt overdressed the entire flight with our double layers of clothing and heavy coats right up until the point we stepped out of the Moscow ariport and got that first blast of frigid air.   This is a cold that people from West Texas are just not equipped to comprehend without experiencing it!

The drive from the airport to the New Arbat area only took about 30 minutes. We had heard that it is sometimes 2 or 3 times that long, maybe we just got lucky with traffic and it being a weekend.   Pashe took us to exchange money (a gave us a few money scam pointers) and then to a market to pick up a few groceries for our apartment.   We were very happy he went along with us for our first trip to the market.   You’d think that food packaging would be familiar enough that it would be easy to pick out a few basic items but we were suprised at how different everything looked (check out the mustard that comes in a toothpaste tube and the stern woman on the milk box.)   Here’s what roughly 450 rubles (or $18) worth of groceries in Moscow looks like:



After grocery shopping, we checked in to our "Panorama" apartment and are very pleased with it.   It is exactly how it looks in the photos and we are close to several restaurants amp; food markets.   Peace Travel sent a courier over to our apartment about an hour after arrival to pick up our passports and register our visas.   I was a little uncomfortable handing over our passports but I was assured it was safe and the courier returned with them about an 10 minutes later.   We are still unclear about this whole visa registration thing and I didn’t see anything different on our passports so I’ll be following up on that tomorrow to make sure everything is okay.

The view out our apartment window is impressive.   We can see a little bit of what would normally be the Moscow River (right now it is just frozen ice) and the street is lined with casinos.   At night, it looks like we are on the strip in Vegas.   Here’s a photo from this afternoon:



The building on the left side of the photo has a casino at the bottom of the floor.   If you continue up the road it leads to the Kremlin.   In fact, just as we were arriving at our apartment today, the police made Pashe pull over because they were clearing the way for Putin’s motorcade.   We never actually saw him but Pashe said that this occurs each time Putin travels down New Arbat street.

We took a short nap this afternoon and are trying to stay awake so we can get on Moscow time.   I’m really looking forward to bedtime though!   Tomorrow we meet with our agency’s local coordinator and then go the MOE to receive information about our referral and then it will be off to meet our little one.

I can’t wait to post the details of tomorrow’s events!   Until then, think WARM thoughts for us!!!
 

Labels: traveling