The Food and Other Mundane Details

First, our darling Micah's baby picture:

and Gideon's sweet baby picture:

So many parents do not get baby pictures of their adopted children, and we will treasure these glimpses into our sons' past.  We are trying to remember as much as we can so we can tell the boys about their birth country's culture as they grow up.  We want them to know.

Now on to the mundane details of daily life as we wait.  You may be thinking that we are enjoying exotic local cuisine and expanding our palates at each and every meal here.  Well, if so, I hate to disappoint you, but we are really not finding anything amazing or adventurous to rave about at mealtimes.  Here is a typical breakfast for us (thanks to our water kettle . . . before we bought that it was usually just yogurt):

And at lunchtime, it is usually sandwiches and juice.  We are both getting tired of PBJ.  Derek's favorite is swiss cheese and corned beef on rye.  And we were happy to find some mustard in a fancy, upscale food market before we left the big city, so that really helps to liven up the sandwiches!  The juice here is very good!

For dinner, we usually order a pizza.  We have not found any other restaurants or places to eat in the village (well, except for the meat pies from the deli counter inside the market, but that really doesn't count!)  The pizza is wonderful!  We usually eat at the snack bar in the hotel lobby.  The lady there has come to expect us most evenings.  We stumble our way through ordering, in (probably very bad) Russian, a pizza, a pot of green tea, and a cup of coffee.  And this is what she brings us:

It is fabulous!  And all for less than four dollars!  Can't really beat that, so we keep coming back, night after night.  I have to say though, 15 days into this adventure, that I am really, REALLY craving vegetables!  A big bowl of steamed broccoli perhaps, or a great big green salad.  But since there are no vegetables to be found, at least none that are safely cooked, we finish the day with treats like this instead:

That is a tube of chocolate ice cream on the right, which is a little tricky to open once the ice cream is partially melted, but it is quite delicious.  If you know Derek, you probably know that he has quite a sweet tooth, so he loves that these bags of toffees and candies are about a dollar each.  

And the bottles of water cost us about a dollar, which is not bad.  We drink it, we brush our teeth with it, and we wash dishes in it.  We go through a lot of water.  

The money is colorful.  I love that the bills get larger as the denominations go higher.  A 200 note is much larger than a 1.  200 pays one night's stay in the hotel (equal to $25).  

My nine-year-old, Isaac, will be interested in the European electrical outlets:

and the light switches:

And we are rejoicing that our very long weekend is nearly over and we get to go see the boys in the morning. The highlight of our day today was this:

We finally found a place to wash some laundry!  Now it is spread all over our room, drying.  We seriously did not travel to the other side of the world to eat pizza and do laundry, though.  This has been a whole lot of sitting around doing nothing this weekend.  We are SO READY to go see our boys again, and ready to get this adoption finished and to get all of our babies home together, where they belong!