Day Ten

Today was a quiet day. JJ and I slept in later. It helped that our "alarm" did not go off at 7:00am. There is a TV in the kitchen. Every morning since we arrived here it has come on blaring at 7:00am. JJ finally decided to unplug the TV last night. I fixed us a late breakfast and cleaned up the kitchen afterwards. It has been nice to cook some of our own meals, but it means we have to do dishes too. Not my favorite pastime, but it makes our days feel more normal. We went out exploring. First we went to a little bird statue Anna had pointed out. Well, actually we noticed a cat statue on our own earlier in our stay and they are the same kind of thing. We noticed the cat because it was up fairly high on a building and a man had climbed up to the cat and seemed to be scooping up money. Anna explained that people throw money at the figures for good luck and then special people collect the money. I'm not sure what they do with the money. The bird is on a wall bordering the river so the money that misses falls into the water, but Anna said she even saw a man in a special suit collecting the money from the water. After we each managed to land one coin on the bird's ledge we walked on to a park to feed some real birds with bread. The birds took awhile to realize we had bread, but soon we had a whole flock gathered around our park bench. Next we decided to walk on the Nevsky prospect in a new direction today. This street is near our apartment and it is one the main streets in downtown St. Petersburg. It has many many shops along with some famous tourist attractions. We got some yummy ice cream from a street vendor. We found a mall! It was six stories and each level had shops of similar stores. For example, one level had women's clothing. The whole bottom level was a grocery store and it had several American brands of food! The sad part was how expensive they were. We even found Oreo's, but they cost around $12.00! The really exciting find was Dr. Pepper!! We got one can because it was expensive and said, "now less sugar" so it might not taste the same. We had lunch in the food court then headed back to the apartment. We had a Skype video call with my PreK students and JJ's 7th graders. It was difficult to make out their faces, but it was nice to hear their little voices. I know they (my students) don't understand how far away we are. At one point one of the older kids asked if there are any stores like Walmart in St. Petersburg and I heard one of the PreK kids say, "There's a Walmart in Woodward. I've seen it". Too cute! I miss them. They will be out of school before we get our little guy. We found out today we won't get him until June 2nd because of the infrequency of flights from Kotlas. Yuck! Well here are some pictures from our day.