Friday, November 14, 2008

Nov 14: Groundhog Day

If you follow more than one or two adoption blogs, you’ve likely seen this term before, a reference to the 1993 Bill Murray movie where he keeps waking up to the same day over and over again. And that’s how much of the adoption trip went. If you want to know what we did on November 13, 2007, read the blog post from yesterday. Very little changes from day to day!


There was one thing, however, that did change on this day. As we had done the day before, we went downstairs at 9:50 to look for the “dark Kia”. There was indeed a dark Kia waiting near our doorstep, so I said hello to the driver and proceeded to get into the car. As we sat down in the backseat, Zack said this car was different. The driver began to make his way out of the parking lot and onto Lenina (the main street), and we suddenly realized that the man driving the car was not our driver, Misha. I began to panic, especially when he started asking us for directions. It was obvious that he knew ZERO English, so I frantically tried to communicate in Russian. Finally, as I was pulling out the cell phone to call Luda, I blurted out something to the effect of “Where’s Misha?”. The guy laughed and said that he was helping Misha. We remained very uneasy until he pulled into the parking lot of the orphanage, and only then did we breathe a sigh of relief!


Each day we’d left our apartment – whether by car or by foot – we turned right out of the building. This would take us to Supermarket Moskva, Fox Trot, the internet café, and Abzhora. So after lunch on this day, we decided to go left out of our apartment building and venture down the other end of Lenina. We discovered an open-air market, a restaurant or two, and a mega store, Amstor. For our Ukrainian trip, this was the closest thing to a Wal-Mart we ever found. They sold household items, electronics, and clothing, and also had a HUGE grocery store. It was nice to see something new, and it was also fun to peruse all the Christmas decorations that had just arrived at the store.



CLICK HERE to read our blog post from Nov 13, 2007

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We had a very frightening driver story in China too- could not communicate= just handed him a note of where to take us that the guide had written out for us. Had no idea if he would really get us there. It was scary but we made it and all was well. Glad it turned out good for you all too!!!

K said...

Ok, what is internat and groupa?

Anonymous said...

Internat is orphanage and groupa is the group or class of children that they are in.

Kathy and Matt said...

Ahh, the memories....
We became habitual shoppers at Amstor. Lots of groceries, great place to get phone cards, household items, etc.