Tuesday, May 29, 2007

This morning was a very lazy morning. Fred and I hung out at the apartment until 12:15pm. Svieta got a phone call at 10am to inform her that Mark and Christine would be having court at 11am…that morning. She quickly got dressed and headed out of the apartment. She told us that she would call to let us know when our driver would pick us up. We hadn’t heard from her at 12:15pm, so we decided to head out to get some money exchanged. When Svieta called us, we were on our way to the center of town to get more money. She told us that she would pick us at 12:45pm. We hurried to get our money exchanged and ran back to the apartment. We then headed to the orphanage to pick up the girls. The girls were a lot quieter than usual today. When we got to the orphanage, Svieta went into the orphanage to talk to Ludmilla while we played with the girls. When she came out she told us that Amina’s medical documents were ready to be signed. We quickly followed her into the orphanage to sign the paperwork. The doctor went over Amina’s medical history, Svieta translated, and Fred and I signed on the dotted line. It didn’t take very long since Amina is very healthy! When we headed back outside and played with the girls for a few minutes…then we were told that the girls had dance practice. The girls headed to dance and Mark and Christine headed to lunch with Fred and I. Svieta needed to take care of some documents so she went off on her own. We had asked her earlier in the day if it would be possible to take the girls to see Shrek 3. She said she would have to check with Ludmilla, but Ludmilla was very busy. After lunch, we wandered through the mall for a little while and then headed to the movie theater. Svieta had hoped to meet us there, but she had still not been able to talk to Ludmilla. She had our driver pick us up and take us back to the orphanage. When we got back to the orphanage, Svieta was still waiting to see Ludmilla. After a few minutes, we saw Ludmilla walking down the hall toward us. Svieta explained that we wanted to take the children to Shrek 3 and Ludmilla gave us permission. We quickly rounded up the 3 girls and headed to the theater. When we got to the theater, Svetlana helped us buy tickets. The theater only has 5 rows and you had to purchase tickets for specific seats. Mark and Christine bought their tickets first and we bought ours next. Unfortunately, our tickets were not all together. The girls decided that they 3 of them would sit in one set of seats and Fred and I could sit with Mark and Christine. Christine and I ran back to our apartment while Svieta pointed out the seats to Mark, Fred, and the girls. Svieta told us that she wouldn’t be going to see the movie with us. When Christine and I got to the theater, the movie had already started. Apparently, after Svetlana showed the girls their seats, they decided to move. There was enough seats for the 3 girls and Mark and Fred to sit together, but not for Christine and I. We ended up sitting in the row behind them. During the movie, my phone began to flash at me. (I had turned the volume off) I didn’t plan on taking the call, but I noticed it was Svetlana so I ran out of the theater to take it. I was quite surprised that she would call when she knew we were in the movie. She asked me to run outside of the theater to get the keys to our apartment. She told me she was heading out of town in order to get our documents to Sasha. She said that she wouldn’t be back until after 10 pm. When the movie ended, we called Svetlana to ask her how we would get back to the orphanage. She told us that Mark and Christine’s driver would be meeting us in front of the theater and that he would have another driver with him for our family to ride with. The two drivers would take us back to the orphanage where we would say goodbye to the girls and then Mark and Christine’s driver would take us all home. When we got to the apartment, we decided to walk over to Papa Karlo to get on the internet. We were able to upload our blog, however, we lost our internet connection quickly after that. It seems that the workers at Papa Karlo are not big fans of Americans. When we overstay our wecome, they unplug our wireless access point. After a while, we figured that they weren’t planning on plugging it back in, so we left. We headed back to our apartment. We watched a little bit of Shrek 2 (in English) before Svetlana got home. When she got home, we asked her why she had to rush off so quickly. She told us that she had all the necessary documents for Kiev, but that she didn’t have them in time to meet the train in our city. She headed to a larger city which is a few hours away and handed off the documents to someone on the train there. She then headed back home. She was quite tired and so were we. We said goodnight and then headed to bed.