Welcome to Russia

I’m sitting here in our hotel room in St. Petersburg after having arrived yesterday and spending our first night here. I was up already at 4:45 local time. We have internet access in our room so I browsed a bit and saw the Sunday Night Football game is still going. It’s strange that it’s still yesterday back home. I slept like a rock after having been up for over thirty hours flying here. Now that Jessie’s up, she can’t sleep either. We’re staying at the Hotel Devoestky and it’s located on Vladimir Prospekt which is fairly close to the City Center here in St. Petersburg. It’s a fairly small room. Everyone told us the hotel rooms in Russia were on the small side and they were right. It’s supposedly a four-star hotel, but that's by Russian standards. It’s adequate and clean though. The hotel occupies three floors above a 24 hour four-story shopping center. The shopping center is very upscale and way out of our league. It features mostly upscale westernized stores.

We arrived at the St. Petersburg airport (Polkova 1) at around 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon and went through passport control before being met by Nina. Nina is our facilitator on the Russian side of things. She is the one who originally identified Roman and Sergei before sending Carol from Catholic Social Services (CSS) the referral. She seems to be the key player in this whole process. She doesn’t speak a bit of English but fortunately our translator Oksana does. Oksana works for Nina and will be our translator during our staying St. Petersburg. Another CSS family, Patricia from North Carolina and her mother Arlene from New York, are also here and are staying at the same hotel. She too is here to meet her daughter for the first time. We actually met up with them at the airport in Atlanta but parted ways there as we flew to Amsterdam and they to Moscow. We both arrived in St. Petersburg at around the same time yesterday. They arrive at a different airport (Polkova 2) because they flew a domestic flight in from Moscow.

We were led to our vehicle for our ride to the hotel. Sergey will be our driver while we’re in St. Petersburg. Nina went off with Patricia and Oksana stayed with us. Oksana pointed out some of the sights on our way in. Most of the architecture along the outskirts of St. Petersburg is from the Stalin and Soviet era during the 1930’s and 40’s. These are the huge concrete facades we’re used to seeing on television. As we got closer to the City Center, the styles changed and the buildings were much more historical and sightly. Many of these buildings are well over 200 years old and are from when St. Petersburg was first built during Peter the Great’s reign.

On our trip in, Oksana told us what we can expect during our short stay here. We first get to meet the boys Monday, sometime after 11:30am. We’re nervous and excited! We were told that we have to then meet with the Adoption Committee on Tuesday to formally accept the referral. The Adoption Committee is some governmental sub group of the local Ministry of Education (MOE). They are the ones who oversee the adoption process here. Sometime after that we have to get a few documents notarized and that’s about it as far as paperwork goes on this trip. We should be able to meet with the boys each day this week and maybe even Thursday before we head out to Moscow to have our medical exams on Friday.

After we arrived at the hotel, Jessie and I checked in and got a few things unpacked. Oksana and Nina met with Patricia first and then Oksana came up to our room to go over some of the details.

After that, we were ready for bed but decided to bum around the hotel a bit. We walked around the block. There were lots of people and activity. We noticed a few homeless people and some younger males hanging around and drinking beer. There were a lot of younger males walking around or just hanging out and drinking.

We stopped at the local super market to look for dinner but ended up buying a bottle of water, Coke Light and caramel popcorn. The supermarket is actually in the basement of the hotel and shopping center. It's open 24 hours and seems to have a decent selection although everything is in Russian. We had no idea what all the canned and bags foods were so we played it safe. They call Diet Coke ,Coke Light here in Russia. Some of the food in the deli looked very good but we just didn’t feel brave enough yet to try some of the Russian cuisine. We decided to venture back to the hotel lobbey and grab a bite to eat from the deli. We had no idea what we picked out from behind the counter because everything is in Russian and no one spoke English. We each picked out a piece of pizza and a small sandwich. My pizza ended up being pepperoni I think. Jessie discovered hers was topped with corn and some kind of tuna fish spread. Yummy!

Once back at our room, it didn’t take long for us to fall asleep. I fell asleep watching BBC, one of the two only English channels on TV here. The other is some sort of European sports channel.