Angela's Thoughts . . .

THE ORPHANAGE

Most of the days we have been here we have gone to visit with Camryn and Courtney.

The orphanage is just an old building, not in the best condition but better than I had anticipated. There were children playing outside. They have many little outside play areas and things for them to play on. They divide the children up by age at the orphanage it ranges from infant to about 3 or 4. They can have children that are as young as about a month and a half. All the children that I have seen appear to be happy. But they don’t know any different then living in an orphanage so I really wouldn’t expect them to be unhappy.

The first day we spent about four hours with the girls. Katy really enjoyed finally meeting her sisters. She was very sad when they left and cried because she wanted to play with them more. She didn’t want them to take her sisters away.

On the second day (if I remember correctly) we were getting things ready to leave and say goodbye to the girls when Lydia (a translator) asked if they had shown us what room the girls group was in. The day before one of the caretakers came and took them to go back so we did not know where to take them. After we were all cleaned up and ready to go we followed Lydia to their room. When we walked in the room Lori and I just kind of looked at each other. I am sure that we were thinking the same thing. I wish we could just take them all home with us and I think that it almost made it harder that day to leave the girls there for another time. I cannot image what Lori was really feeling. There were many children that looked sick. Almost every one of them had cuts, scrapes, bumps and bruises on there faces (the only part of their bodies we could see, they keep many layers of clothing on them). There is this blue and green ointment (if that is even what it is) that they put on the children’s cuts and every one of them had some blue or green on them, It was really sad to see.

EKATERINBURG

I think the best way for me to describe this city is poor but in the process of big development. There are lots and lots of old buildings but they are building new ones every where you look. There are some really nice looking buildings that are all windows but it’s kind of weird - almost all the buildings look old, even the new ones. The only way you can tell a new building is new is because it is at least a 12 stories high or they are still in the process of building it. I think that it is because of the weather - they must not put a lot of time into making them look nice.
They have lots of tall buildings that are made out of little red bricks. It must take them a really long time to actually finish.

Other than a grocery store, this part of the city that we are staying in doesn’t really have anything for us to do. We have to walk pretty far to get to anything. It was really hard the first few times we went walking because Katy would get tired quickly and we couldn’t get very far. Luckily, Olga (the adoption agency coordinator) let us borrow a stroller so, the other day we got to go for a long walk.

We have found this outside shopping mall area that has a lot of high end shops. Lots of clothing and shoe stores (specifically boots). Not really anything that we were looking for. Although I think it is interesting to know that they are so in to fashion here. Just about all the girls wear stiletto boots with jeans or short or knee length skirts. I still cannot figure out why so many of them wear skirts because it is so FREEZING COLD out. I guess that they just really do not care about being cold. Guys just kind of dress normal except almost all the guys seam to wear dress shoes. You don’t see very many people casually dressed.

Since we finally got a stroller we walked all the way to the end of the outside shopping mall and found this area that we had driven by on a previous day that we wanted to go to. It is a sidewalk right down the middle of the road that has all kinds of vendors selling stuff. They had lots of nesting dolls, baskets, decorative wooden bowls and spoons, lots of carvings made out of some kind of stone, and many other souvenir things. It was neat to walk thru all of that. I think Katy was a little bored - we still haven’t found anything for her to do. After we were done with that we were going to go eat pizza at this place we found but it was way too packed inside. We would have had to wait forever so we made our way back “home”. We did find a different way we could walk though.

When we were driving around the other day we did drive by a zoo that we want to take Katy to. For those that don’t know Ekaterinburg is right on the boarder of Asia and Europe. So I would also like to go and see the monument that they have. You can be in both continents at the same time. We might go do some sight seeing after court. This week is a little busy for Lori – she has lots of preparing to do.


SOME OTHER STUFF

After court and Megan has arrived we will be traveling to Chelyabinsk (where Katy was adopted from). It is about 4 hours away from Ekaterinburg. Lori has kept in contact with the coordinator from Katy’s adoption and she wants us to come and visit there. Although I have heard things from Lori, I am curious to see how different the two cities are.

I would post pictures of some of the things that I am talking about but, we had to borrow a computer to be able to use the internet and it’s an old one. We cannot figure out how to get pictures on the computer to post. Plus, it doesn’t help that all the programs are written in Russian !