We Made It!!!

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon here in Moscow, Russia.  The sun is shining and it's about 75 degrees.  Our flights were very uneventful even though we were forty-five minutes late getting into JFK (due to the fact that we flew our most hated carrier - Delta Airlines, that's just for you Todd Creech).  We made quite a few observations standing in our many lines for tickets and passport control in Moscow: 1)  Russians are very quiet.  There were 300 people waiting to go through passport control and you could hear a pin drop. 2)  Americans are very loud.  As we waited for our Moscow flight, we met two other families adopting from Russia.  We were the loudest folks in the flight lounge. 3)  Some Russians can consume vast amounts of alcohol and you see no effect in their behavior.  Good thing since they were sitting across from us.  They still remained very quiet. 4)  For all you Europeans out there, the tennis shoe with dark socks look has not caught on and will never catch on.  Time to move on. 5)  Seems like an inordinate amount of American men wear plaid.  (Thank you Vonda for picking me out a nice plaid shirt to stick out as an American in these terror ridden times.) We called Allie from JFK and she was doing well.  Having fun working for Papa.   It's 6:30 AM at home right now, so we're going to call her in about an hour if we can figure out the phones and the phone card I got at Wal-mart.  Anastasia picked us up at the airport.  She works for CHI and is very nice.  She said she likes her Tennessee families the best because they're always so nice.  We hope everything goes our way so we don't ruin her image of us.   :)  Our driver is Michael, and I think he was impressed that I knew some of the Russian built car's names.  He'll pick us up at 9:00 tomorrow morning.  We'll meet at CHI for a seminar and then go to the Ministry of Education at 11:00.  After receiving the referral from them, we'll go to the orphanage in the afternoon. Our hotel is much nicer than we expected.  I just hope we bought enough febreeze for our clothes since it seems that everyone in Russia smokes and smokes everywhere regardless of any posted no smoking signs.  I have a lovely picture of Vonda in our large Russian bath tub, but I can't post it right now.  Keep your eyes open for that one. Allie,  we hope you're reading the blog each day.  Mommy and Daddy miss and love you very much and can't wait to get home to you.  We'll tell Jack you said hello tomorrow. Love, Steve and Vonda