Hello Everyone,
Things are going well. We have been in Almaty since we arrived. Big, old city with 1.5 million in population. Giant mountains surround it covered with snow caps. Weather here is unusually mild, pretty much 50-60s during the day. Very polluted, still use leaded gas. Traffic congested and driving is insane. Lanes and, for that matter, red lights don't mean much. Need to wait a few seconds after light changes before you go to be sure its clear. Pedestrians have NO right of way. Car alarms have a habit of going off in the middle of the night outside our hotel, not sure why. Current hotel is old and I'll define as OK, walls are paper thin and you can hear all hallway activity clearly. Wish I knew Russian, certainly would have understood more.
Unfortunately the boys are in a room on the floor above us, so we are looking forward to going to Taldy-Korgan tomorrow morning (around 4 hours by car over 2 Mountain ranges) to go to the Ministry of Education and then meet Alena at the orphanage. Taldy-Korgan is a much smaller town. We are 11 hours ahead of you. Today we met with our adoption coordinator, Tatayana, signed some docs that are written in Russian and she translates for us by reading them in English, then we went to the American Embassy to get our fingerprints updated.
There were 7 couples or just the Mom there with their babies doing exit interviews at the US Embassy and heading home. Most of them took 7-8 weeks to finalize and go home for good. The boys and I plan to come home in 3 weeks. Kelly is probably going to London but may come home as well as we have a 10-30 day lag between court date and final adoption approval to bring Alena home. I was practicing my Russian on our driver (he doesn't speak ANY English) saying words from our Russian/English dictionary, he was laughing his head off, although he did understand me. Well, need to try to get back to sleep.
Joe
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