Archive for April, 2009
Looks like I’m going to Vietnam next month.
It’s 3:00am and we’re 30 minutes away from leaving EK this time. We’ll be back in a few months to wrap things up and bring home our son.
Tomorrow should bring more information, but I think we can safely say that this has been a successful trip!
Here are a few more pictures from Ekaterinburg.
The circus! It looked pretty closed for the season.
A beautiful old house with the golden dome of a church in the background. There are a lot of churches in EK, and these old houses are still to be found, scattered throughout the downtown. As you get outside of the downtown you see more and more of them.
Just off the main square in the downtown is a pedestrian only zone lined with shops and cafes/bars. Every once in a while there is a statue. Some are pretty fun, and some are…well…art.
DC has its elephants and donkeys, Tiffin has its squirrels. EK has its bears. This is the only one we’ve seen so far, but it was a cool one! Stanley liked it too.
What central square would be complete without a statue of Lenin just across the street from the Gum department store?
There have been some efforts to dress up part of the riverside in the downtown, aside from the area around the town pond. This is a nice little riverwalk. It would have been nicer without the 6″ of snow and the freezing weather!
Wednesday morning we have another appointment at the Ministry, presumably to receive permission to proceed. We’ll know more tomorrow morning.
In other news, it has snowed every day here. Today the high temp was 1C. Brrrr!
Monday morning, and we’re down to the business of the process. The first step we had to accomplish was registering our dossier and intention with the Ministry of Social Protection of the Population of Sverdlovsk Region.
At the appointed time we (plus our facilitator) arrived at the Ministry and were invited into a room where we joined two employees of the Ministry. The interview was not long, but there were a lot of questions.
I handed over a copy of our dossier and as one of the people looked through the paperwork we were asked to tell a bit about ourselves, our reasons for adopting, for adopting from Russia, and from the Sverdlovsk region. We were asked if we had any communication with other families who adopted from the region, what we understood of their experience and satisfaction. What are the parameters of a child we would hope to adopt? Have we had experience with children of that age? Understand that healthy children are not available, so the wait will be substantial; all the children who are available have special needs to a varying degree. You have the right to an independent medical evaluation of a child, should your dossier be accepted and a child identified for you. No, you don’t have to decide that right now, you may speak with the doctor at the orphanage first.
At the end, we were thanked and told that our dossier was accepted and that our contact in the city could call starting tonight to see if a child has been identified. We signed two pieces of paper and that was it.
Step 1, completed.
Chris and Flat Stanley at the Mozart Cafe in Vienna, Austria. Stanley says hi to Hanna and Cole!
This is the new Hyatt and conference center in downtown EK. They’re trying to turn this part of the riverside into a new business city. Conferences are already big business here and hopes are that the Hyatt will draw more still.
Rachel astride the line dividing Europe and Asia. The Ural Mountains is where the two continents meet, and EK is just a few kilometers to the east of the line.
The cathedral built over the location where Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed during the Bolshevik Revolution.
We’re staying at the Moskovskaya Gorka (Moskovsyaka Hill) hotel which is not (again, NOT) in the center of EK. Rather, it is in an area of residential flats. Yesterday, it looked quite dreary in the snow, to be honest, but today the sun came out, the sky was blue, and everything looks better!
Our hotel is really quite nice. The rooms are comfortable – monochromatic, but comfortable. The lack of chromatic variety in the room is more than compensated by some of the people we’ve seen coming and going in the lobby. Fashion is alive and well, even in mud season.
The hotel serves a hearty buffet breakfast. There’s something for everyone. These last two mornings there has always been a basket of hardboiled eggs, potatoes, cold cuts, cheese, pickles, some kind of porridge, and Russian delicacies like cottage cheese pie, pastries, kafir, blinni and sour cream. Blinni are like crepes, but rolled up; today they were filled with cooked cabbage (better than it sounds!) and yesterday’s were filled with raisins. Kafir is a sour yoghurt drink that we have yet to try. Also, very important, is the strong coffee. Each morning we’ve tried something new, so by the time we leave we’ll have covered all the bases for breakfast.
This afternoon we were met by our facilitator and driven around the city a bit. We started at the Town Pond, really a wide, shallow spot in the river that runs through town. There’s a nice park on either side, and in warmer weather we’re told it is full of people rollerblading or enjoying the riparian lifestyle. Today we saw a couple guys icefishing and fighting off the icy wind. Brrrr!
We then went to the cathedral built on the spot where Czar Nicholas II and his family (the last of the Romanovs) were executed during the Bolshevik revolution. The house where the event actually happened was torn down by Boris Yeltsin in the 90s, but in recent years a cathedral was planned, designed and built on the spot to honor the memory of the Royal family. A service was in process when we entered the building. In Russian Orthodox churches you don’t sit, but you stand through the whole service. People also do not come and stay for the whole thing. While we were there the crowd churned almost constantly. There was a small choir that sung the service along with the priest, and the sound was hauntingly beautiful!
We swung by a supermarket to pick up some supplies. It wouldn’t normally be a noteworthy event, but our expectations were way off on this one. I know that we’re well beyond the days where supplies were limited and you took what was available, but I didn’t expect to see so much variety. Anything we could have wanted was available. We had to get our bags (backpack and purse) sealed in plastic before we entered the store. Except for that fact, and that all the labeling was in Cyrillic, this could have been any supermarket in DC.
Alexey’s daughter met up with us and we drove out of town to the “official” line between Asia and Europe. The monument is in a park up in the Ural mountains; well, here they are really hills, but apparently up in the North the Urals really are mountains. We took some pictures at the monument standing with one foot on each continent. In just a moment a freezing wind blew up and it started to snow! As we were running back to the car, three other vehicles pulled up and a wedding party hopped out for pictures. The monument is a very popular place for newly married couples to visit because legend says it is good luck in the fertility department.
As we were driving around, people kept pointing out all the theaters to us. Before we leave this week we are going to try to see something, like a play, concert or ballet. Of course whatever we can see will be in Russian, so we’re hoping for a concert or ballet – they’re easier to translate in real time.
Tomorrow starts the business part of the trip. We present our dossier and wait to see what comes. Keep fingers crossed!
It’s an early Sunday here. Woke up at about 6:00am, which isn’t all that bad. I did need a little help getting to sleep last night, but when you’re just shy of halfway around the world that can be forgiven.
Random thought – we’re pretty well north here. The sun was still setting after 9:00pm, and now at 6:30 I’m starting to see twilight.
Today we’re going to see a bit of the city. I’m not quite sure what that means, but tonight we’ll have something to say. 
Maybe pictures of the city, too, if it isn’t too cold for the cameras.
We arrived in Yekaterinburg (also written Ekaterinburg, or abbreviated EK) early this morning after successfully executing our 12 hour layover in Vienna. We were met at the airport, successfully installed in our hotel , showered and in bed by 6:00am.
Yesterday, Vienna was lovely. It was a perfect early spring day; bright blue, cloudless sky, sun all day, a little chilly in the shade, but warm and comfortable in the sun. We trained directly to the downtown from the airport and hopped from café to café sampling the Viennese pastry as we moved from Stephensplatz, to the State Opera and the Sacher Hotel , over to the Hapsburg Palace and Spanish Riding School. There, we found a patch of grass on the palace’s lawn and joined the Viennese in a little relaxed sunbathing under the watchful eye of the Emperor’s statue.
The people watching was amazing. Purple seems to be the color of the year. Pants, jackets, hats, ties, tights – I don’t think we saw purple hair. There were so many languages, too. I know we heard a lot of German (of course), but also Spanish, Japanese, English (of course), Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, French and a few we couldn’t place.
The old buildings reminded me a lot of what I saw in Kiev and pictures of other old European cities like Budapest. There’s just beautiful.
Of course, Vienna is a big city and we confined ourselves to the old, touristy area, so we didn’t get a representative impression of the city. As the center of an old Empire in the center of Europe, we expected variety and boy did we get it.
Today, what a change! We’ll be lucky if the temperature gets much above freezing. It’s snowing right now. I looked out the window and joked that it looks like Siberia – of course, this is the western edge of Siberia! If we weren’t so tired (and if it weren’t so cold) we might try to get out and walk around. I think we’ll be satisfied with the gym.
We’re in mud season now, so the city isn’t looking all that great people admit. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll be able to get into the city center and see some of EK. Today, we rest and recover.