Up at 5am. Yuck. Platinum Dan, my travel expert husband, says that day 3 is the worst and it will get better tomorrow. We'll see. The problem is the light. White Nights can really mess up your internal clock. It gets dark around 10pm, but the sun comes back up at about 3am. Very strange, and yet cool.
We have had a great couple of days together. We are in a different hotel this trip. It is newly renovated and in one of the old buildings overlooking a canal. Great view. On Saturday we explored on our own. We got brave and figured out how to ride the subway. We also found a really nice mall just 10 minutes walk from the hotel. They have a bowling alley! We took Sasha bowling. I would love to attach a photo, however I am sad to say that after snapping several pictures I noticed that we had not put the memory card back in the camera. Duh. We had lots of fun once we figured it out. No one spoke English there and there were no English signs. Dan and I can Cyrillic, but if the word doesn't phonetically translate to English is doesn't do you any good. Eventually an exasperated attendant took pity on us and set our lane. :) Poor guy. Little does he know we'll be back later this week and we're bringing another American family with us. They arrived last night and are adopting a 10 year boy.
You can really learn a lot about a person by taking them bowling. I already knew that Sasha was competitive but it was really on display with bowling. After rolling her 3rd - 4th gutter ball, she was done. She noticed that the neighboring family had the bumper rails up. Our lane didn't have bumper rails. She wanted the bumpers. She needed the bumpers. She wasn't going to rest until she had the bumpers. I used my handy dandy Russian/English translation book and explained we must finish this game but next game we will try to move to a lane with bumpers. She reluctantly finished the first game and was elated to start the next game with bumpers. With bumpers, on her third turn she got her first strike. She was so excited that she did a little dance to celebrate. She has had dance lessons so I will say that the dance was really quite good. Hip hop in nature with a Michael Jackson moonwalk at the end.
Yesterday our guide Natasha took us to the Russian state museum. All Russian art by Russian artists. Simply beautiful and of course, housed in yet another Czar Palace. How many palaces can one city have? Sasha's knowledge of art history is quite amazing. She pointed out to our group that in a certain painting this particular artist had painted the eyes so that no matter what point of view you looked from, the eyes were looking at you. She knows what century works of art are from, artists names, what country they are from, etc. She knows architecture around St. Petersburg. She knows names of bridges, buildings, and cathedrals, when they were built, how they were built, the materials used to build them, and the name of the architect. Again I find myself asking, "Who is this kid?"
Who is this kid? That is where the grief strikes for me. In the midst of all of this joy I find myself grieving on the inside. I have missed so much of her life. A couple of weeks ago I babysat my niece and nephew. Jack is 5 and Sophia is 2. As I held Sophia's chubby little hand and looked into her face I found myself overcome with grief for a moment. I missed this time with Sasha. I will never even know what her chubby two year old hands and face looked like. That makes me so sad.
Grief and joy all at the same time. But she is so worth it. These kids are so worth it. Sasha and hundreds of thousands of Russian kids like her have enormous potential and so much to offer the world. They just need a family and a chance. If you include orphans in the rest of the world including the US the numbers reach the millions. Grief? Yes. Is it hard? Yes. Is it for everyone? Heck no! But if you're the adventuresome type it is so worth it. The ultimate adventure. How many families have room at their table for one more?
Please forgive me for the lack of pictures. The internet connection at this hotel is simply awful. I will try to take my computer to another location with better wifi later and upload some photos.
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