Angela's Thoughts . . .

So today was Lori's court date and everything went well. Wooo Hooooo!!!!!! :o)

We are now trying to figure out when we will be returning home. I think we should be coming home on October 16th. We are just waiting to see how things go in Moscow.

Katy and I stayed at the flat when Lori went to court. She was not happy that her mom was leaving her today and screamed when Lori left. This made it a little harder on Lori. I am sure that she knew she would be fine, which she was - she only cried for a minute.

Other than Lori having court we didn't do anything today except go to the grocery store.
Tomorrow we are going to take Katy to this little indoor play area that they have. It should be nice. I think that Katy will be happy to be out and be able to run around. We have been inside all day for the past few days since Lori has been preparing for court. We are very thankful that that all is over with. We will have lots more free time now. We plan to leave for Chelyabinsk as soon as Megan gets here. After a few days there we will return to Ekaterinburg and do some sight seeing before we pick up Camryn & Courtney. After that we will be off to Moscow for about 5 days and then home.

On a side note-
The other day when we were at the grocery store we were walking thru the frozen food section and I turned to where all the meat was. Looking right back at me was a whole pig wrapped up in saran wrap. I know disgusting!!!!! It makes me like pork and other types of meat even less. As I looked more I saw that all the meat is like that. Nothing is really cut up they just sell the whole thing. So I when we went to get groceries today I took my camera to take a picture of it. Lori thought it was weird that I wanted to take a picture, but I thought it was a little interesting. I have never seen something sold like that in a regular grocery store.

One more thing, we have ice cold water again, even colder than last time. We also don't have any heat. We are thinking that maybe they didn't do something right when they turned on the heat the first time. So they must be fixing it. Hopefully it won't last too long. I don't know how people actually live like this!

Today (9/27) we took Katy to that indoor play area that we have been hearing about. When we pulled up to the place it looked like it was an abandoned building. But when we went inside there was a whole shopping center. It had a grocery store, some little shops, lots of home furnishing stores (which they actually have every where here), a theater and a food court area. Everything here is kind of like that you can not tell what is inside a building just by looking at the outside.

So when we got to the indoor “play area” that was really just an arcade type thing, Katy was very excited to start playing games. First we had to figure out how to get tokens which took us a little bit of time, but luckily we figured it out without having to try and ask for help.

We found some bumper cars to ride. It was really funny because Lori and I could not figure out how to get them to go forward. Every time you pressed on the gas pedal the car would go backwards. I was kind of by the side where people were standing in line to go after us and this lady started yelling at me in Russian about how to make it work. At that point all I could do was laugh because once again we looked like “idiots”. As the lady was telling me what to do in a language I can not understand I just kept trying on my own to get it to work and finally did after a few minutes. I think that she thought that I could understand Russian though because when I finally figured it out she was saying “da” “da” (which is yes in Russian) and then keep on talking like I could understand her. It was really funny and we all had a good laugh about it. Katy enjoyed bumping into my car too - she thought it was just about the funniest thing ever!

So after we played games and did the bumper cars we went and had lunch at a pizza place. Lori did the ordering, she pointed to the cheese pizza and put up four fingers and then pointed to the fries and held up one finger. The girl working there got four pieces of pizza put them on a tray and then gave us one… two…. three…. four things of fries! We couldn’t tell them that we didn’t want all of them so we just took the food and sat down. I was the one that suggested getting fries so Lori thought it would be funny to take a picture with me and all the fries… ha ha ha! We ended up eating almost all of the fries anyway. The pizza and the fries where both really good. Our brown rice with cheese and noodles with an attempted cheese sauce are getting a little old. It was nice to have something different again.

All in all it was a good day! Katy had a really good time playing all the games and riding some of the rides.

It also snowed today. At first it was light little flurries and then about an hour later it was full on snowing!!! The snowing stopped about a half hour later but all the cars and ground were lightly covered in it. It has all stopped and melted now and is sunny out. We are hoping that it doesn’t snow anymore because we are so not prepared for that.

We also have hot water and a little bit of heat again. :o)