We Passed Our Medicals!!!!!

How interesting it has been here today. We woke up and had breakfast here in the hotel. Wow European coffee is soooooo good! The food was very good and very Russian. Not that the food was different, it was all things you would recognize but just the fact that their sausages taste like really good hotdogs and that they serve carrot slaw, tomatoes and cucumbers for breakfast. I love that but Dan is more of a traditional man and tomatoes and cucumbers for breakfast is just not comparable to bacon and eggs. Funny how we are so different. There was also this bread roll that had kraut in it and I really thought I saw pain on his face when he ate it! I thought it was great!!! After breakfast we walked to the store again (by ourselves and we didn’t get arrested) and bought some more meat and cheese for supper and some water and tea. I even paid with Rubles and managed to speak just a little Russian. It was kind of fun! To get to the store you have to go down some stairs and go through a tunnel under the street and then out the other side. There is this bakery there and it smelled so good but since we had already eaten breakfast we didn’t make ourselves gluttons. Next we met Sasha down stairs and realized we have Wi-Fi in the lobby and got very excited. Now I plan to chat with mom later to see how things are going. After we met he took us to our destination. We walked in this room with 4 other families all with their nice, monster yellow chest x-ray folders in their hands. One couple was from Louisiana, 2 were from Germany and we are not sure where the other family was from since we didn’t really talk with them. The doctors came in a couple at a time and asked us a few questions and one of them took our blood pressure. The others just signed off on the basis of our blood work that we had brought with us. Overall, 8 doctors signed off on our documents and then we handed over the money and they stamped everything with the “official blue seal” of Russia. We are good to go to court now!! I loved talking to all the people in there. The couple from Germany we talked to the most were named Gens and Cornelia. They were from Hamburg Germany. They are adopting a 3 year old boy. The couple from Louisiana were here to adopt the 11 year old brother of a little boy they adopted 6 years ago. They said they had looked for him for 3 years and finally found him. Amazing stories and they all give you chills. God is so good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After we got done with all that business which took about 2 & 1/2 to 3 hours we went sight seeing again. Sasha took us to a very old monastery and we saw the graves of many people, some of which died in the 1500’s. He told us that this is the oldest monastery in Moscow and when the Tsar’s were ruling Russia it was common for them to send their wives there when they got tired of them since divorce was not allowed so they could marry someone else. Jokingly Sasha told Dan to remember this place. We all had a nice laugh. I told Sasha that if Dan sent me to the monastery he and the kids would starve to death since he can’t cook!

Then we went to “The Hills” and it was a nice day so we took some pictures and Sasha was right, you really can see almost all of Moscow from there. It was extremely windy. All I could think about was how incredibly cold it must be up there in the dead of winter. We then drove to the middle of downtown so he could show us the house of Peter the Great’s father. We could only see the outside since it was locked but that is ok. It was really neat and it was nestled in right along with new shiny buildings and cars were flying by constantly. Next door to that was a church that was rebuilt in the early 1990’s from a replica of one that sat on the same spot in 1918 which was destroyed in the 1930’s. It is unbelievable how politics work here. Sasha pointed out a building behind the church that Stalin had built to house his top leading officials. It was not uncommon for someone to want someone else’s apartment so he might write a letter to Stalin saying that the person living in that apartment had bad mouthed Stalin and within the next day or two that person writing the letter would have the apartment he wanted because they would kick out the other man. I will leave it at that. Then we came back to the hotel and had our cheese, meat and bread and of course some tomatoes. I am now just waiting until 9:00 PM so I can talk to mom. Tomorrow we leave for Vladivostok at 4:55 PM Moscow time and arrive in Vlad at 8:20 AM Wednesday morning and then we go see Yaroslav. Exciting times ahead I do believe!