Monday, January 8th

We are currently on day 3 of the 10 day wait until the court decree comes into effect and we can take Alex out of the orphanage. We do not have too much to share as we have settled in to our routine. We go to the orphanage in the morning to spend a few hours with Alex. Then we will either walk to town and use the internet or eat lunch and go to the grocery store. We usually get back to the apartment around 3pm and spend the rest of the night there-playing cards, reading, watching movies, etc... (Thanks Michael and Karan for recommending bringing lots of English speaking movies and cds).

We have had a little adventure lately. We live on the main street in Lugansk and in the midde of it is the downtown area with the internet, etc.. and on the other end a little further away is the orphanage. We have started taking small buses down the main street to save on some of the walking and they only cost about $.25. We had done it a few times and felt pretty good about it until 2 days ago. This time after we got on the bus it turned off the main road. It did stop once right after it turned, but we thought from looking at the map in the bus that it would circle back around. Well, about 30 minutes later we were way out in the middle of nowhere. The bus stopped, everyone had gotten off, and the driver looked at us and started speaking in Russian to us - probably wondering why we were still on. We tried to point back and give him our street name asking him to circle back. He called someone on his phone that could speak English and told us what bus we would need to catch instead. So we rode the 30 minutes back to town and then got off and onto the right bus. We didn't mind it too much as we got to see more of the city, and we have plenty of time on our hands. The only thing the nice bus driver could tell us in English was that he is Mormon. He said the words Mormon and Salt Lake City so that is what we think he was telling us.

Last night we went out again around 9pm. We don't normally go out that late, but we needed to get in touch with our travel agent via email and were having a hard time. So on our way back we caught a bus again, and it ended up turning down that same wrong street! We couldn't believe our luck. As soon as it turned, though, we tried to get the driver to let us off. He did after several minutes of driving. We decided to just walk back. I guess we don't have the system figured out that well after all....