Baby Cakes: Day Sixteen-Half Way Point

Today, as my dad reminded me, is the half-way point for our time in Russia and, well, I'm pretty much ready to come home. Nothing against Russia. I have enjoyed our time here. St. Petersburg is a beautiful city. I have never felt unsafe. There are many things to see, shops to explore, and restaurants to investigate. I'm just ready for my own home. I really think even if I was on a tropical beach somewhere I would be ready to go home after two plus weeks. But we haven't accomplished our mission yet, so we have a few more days to go. Today we slept in late. It is hard to motivate yourself to get up early when you have no real agenda for the day. JJ fixed a huge breakfast. We didn't even finish all the blini he prepared. I did some cleaning and laundry. Staying in an apartment is different than a hotel in that way. I'm actually not sure how much cleaning we need to do before we leave on Sunday. We checked everything on the computer and watched some news videos. We've been watching more of the American news reports since the tornado hit Joplin. It rained off and on all day today, but we decided to walk back to the mall anyway. We wandered through some new stores. We found some cute but expensive kids clothes. We did find some crayons for the plane ride home. We'll get coloring books at one of the bookstores later in the week. We found the cleanest bathroom of the whole trip!! Clean bathrooms is pretty high on my list of important things about a place we visit and trust me when I say that many a bathroom, or WC, has fallen way below my usual qualifications for emergency stops. Ugh! I think some of these things would take a whole post. We had our first meal today that I did not enjoy. Overall the food here has been very good, but this was some sort of oriental restaurant in the mall food court (JJ called it the Turkish Sailor) and I couldn't finish the wrap I ordered. Double ugh! On a better note, we found regular Oreo's at the nice grocery store downstairs and decided at this point it was worth the money to have a taste from home. I plan to savor those cookies right after I finish this blog. We also found some fajita seasoning. Yeah! We came back home to get bags, packets, so we could get more groceries at our local market. You have to pay extra money if you want "packets" at the store. We have learned a few things in 16 days. We visited a nearby DVD store just for fun. By this time our half eaten lunch had worn off, so we ate supper at a Japanese place right by our apartment. I guess it was food from around the world day. This culinary adventure was much better. Then we got groceries for the next three days and dodged more rain drops on our final trip home. We did see a rainbow! I got to call my parents and Skype our friends tonight. So today should end on a nice note. We are one day closer to being a whole family back in Texas!

The one good thing about our lunch, a big cold Pepsi.