Weeee!!! Look at the big city!

We had nothing adoption related planned today, so we set out to see the city. Our hotel is a perfect distance, as it turns out, from Red Square and also from the tourist area, Old Arabat. We thought we were headed to Old Arabat first, but when we saw the Kremlin (way in the wrong direction!), we thought, well, since we are here, we'll swing by there!

It was rough trying to read these signs in the Cyrillic alphabet since I know about 3 of the letters. I taped the alphabet on our bathroom mirror at home, but I guess that 6 months of looking at it every day didn't do much. Some of the signs have the English version of the street name underneath, but my maps (we had 3!) only had Russian, so it was seriously like being in a foreign country or very similar. LOL!

So, today taught us what it will be like for our baby girl when we take her home. Everything is new and confusing and takes so much energy trying to make sense of the sights and sounds of every day life, outside of the orphanage.

Front of our hotel, Courtyard Marriott (notice the ample parking our front)

View from the restaurants hotel, looking across the street (we don't know what church this is)

A real live babushka

Parking in the lines is for wimps

More thinking outside of the box parking (does a sidewalk have a right-of-way?)

This is a parking lot, but I have no idea how the folks at the back ever get out!

As I mentioned yesterday, traffic is bad and people do not yeild for pedestrians and they drive as fast as they can when they can (I didn't see any speed limit signs, but maybe they look way different than ours). So, to get across the street, there are a few crosswalks, but mainly you either run for dear life or use one of these underground walkways, which would be especially nice when it's a blizzard outside. The first picture is the sign indicating the walkway.

Now, this is what happens when possibly you are under the influence of some outside substance and you try to cross the street the old fashioned way. This poor guy stood here for several minutes, and finally someone let him across. Cars and buses were whizzing by him and I thought for sure that on Day 2 of our trip that I would witness my first fatality.

Since there were no police witness reports to fill out, we made our way over to Red Square. On the way we found a sign we could almost read: Sbarro! I'm not a huge fan, but it was very comforting to be able to see something familiar. (It's on the left on the green awning.)

Next we see the Kremlin. It is massive and pictures do not do it justice.
The second is the corner of Kremlin with Cathedral in background.

Then, as we started over the hill, we see what is surely a mirage...

This is St. Basil's Cathedral, my favorite of all of the buildings we saw. It is just breath taking! The next time you see this, it will be one of our new baby girl and me as it's tradition to take one before you leave for the U.S.

The top of St. Basil's

Across from the Kremlin in Red Square is the Gum Department Store. It is 3 stories of all kinds of shops from Hermes to Levi's

Inside of Gum

I'm not sure what this massive red building is, but it sits opposite of the St. Basil's in Red Square.

While we are on the topic of buildings, it looks like when they are renovating them, they make a copy of what the building looks like and then attach it to the outside while it's being redone. Seems like a lot of trouble if you ask me! This building was huge and completely covered with a fake cloth front.

Next we headed to the tourist area. It is a pedestrian street called Old Arabat with all sorts of souvenir shops and restaurants. We got some great stuff for our son and some keepsakes for our daughter.

We ate at a cafeteria/buffet called "Moo Moo" but they spelled it "My My." You'd think Americans have never crossed their threshold. We did our best job of pointing and saying, "Eta paraloustra," which means, "That please," but they wanted us to call it by it's name. Well, we didn't play by their rules and showed them! I ended up with this horrid olive broth soup that was supposed to be cheese soup and some weird meat dish that look deceptively good all covered in cheese. Dan had some sort of meatloaf (we are hoping of the cow variety) and some potato things and he said both were good. We both had cranberry juice that was yummy (they only seemed to serve juices, no milk from a moo-moo?). I would like to go back and point to some different things. The prices were excellent, so worth a trip back to try some other mystery dishes.

Inside of My My (maybe it's My My for, "My, my, that olive broth is awful!") They have the cutest high chairs w/ cow spots. I've heard that high chairs of any kind in restaurants are rare.

Any first trip to Russia blog isn't complete without a comment on the fashion. Here are some pictures of women with skin tight jeans (hey, if I were a size 00, I might go for it, too!) and red spiky heeled boots. Check out the last lady attempting to haul her luggage around in those heels! I hear they even wear them when it's icy out!

The women are for the most part very slender here. I've heard 2 theories: 1) The food prices are outrageous---who would eat ice cream if it were $30 a pint in the states! That would do us all a favor! and 2) Many of them smoke. So, I will just give up ice cream and start smoking? Nope!

Lastly, I have to end with a very cute shot of a boy in a snowsuit on Old Arabat. It looked like his grandmother was also in attendance, hence the obligatory snowsuit in 50 degree whether! I saw several other children and they just had on coats w/ mittens and hats that covered the ears and no babuskas yelled at them.

So that's all for this episode of "Wee, look at the big city!" Stay tuned for tomorrow when we meet our Russian Sweet Baby!!! (Again, spell checker isn't working, so fend for yourselves.)