Day #7

Today was a little lazy but I was content. That is good, right! I realized today that the hardest part was probably the "leaving" part with Drew going home. I was really stressed about him driving to Kiev alone. Once that was over and he was safe, I started feeling much better. This morning was great! I read my novel for near 5 hours and knitted for a couple. I am going to watch a movie I brought from home and knit some more tonight. What a life, huh! I guess, really deep down, I always wanted a few days where I could do whatever I wanted and not feel bad about it.

I decided I would try and find the hospital on my own tomorrow and pay it a visit. I am very interested in seeing what their hospitals are like here. I looked around on a google map to see if I could figure out where the dam is. I will probably call Constantine and see if he will take me. He already offered to show us while Victor was here, but we never got a chance to go.

I left the apartment at 2:30 again and ended up finding Masha in the cafeteria still. Their lunch had not been served yet. So I hung around until the meal was over. It was kind of fascinating to watch the kids eat. There are a lot more kids here than there were last year. I guess, many of the kids have places to go for the summers, but are right back in the orphanage once school starts up again. Since we were there during the summer break last year, many kids were gone. The meal was a hot one with some sort of mush, soup, bread and cidar. When Masha was done she wanted to leave the orphanage. So we walked back to the apartment and she did English for an hour and then skimmed through a movie. I knitted and helped her through some of the English vocabulary. While she was here we also skyped with my mom, JR and Tyler. Anastasia was still asleep, so the sisters didn't talk, but Masha was able to talk to her new grandma a little bit. She liked that.

I walked her back to the orphanage and walked home again. I probably got three miles of walking in today. Not bad. I actually broke a sweat coming home because I decided to jog a little of it with my new church coat on...:). It was nice to get my muscles moving again.

A couple miscellaneous things I missed and thought I would type for memory sake.

First. The other orphanage that kids are at in Dnipro is on the other side of the river from the orphanage my girls are from. So this is the orphanage that Alina and her brothers are in. It is a 10-15 minute drive from the location of ours on the other side. This means that the families that are adopting from there will be paying a little more for transportation because the notary and social worker are on the side where my orphanage is. Wendy was also curious about the where abouts of this orphanage because she walked around so much she wondered how she could miss this place??? This brings up another interesting thing about Ukraine.

We have noticed that the cities here go on forever. Usually, if there is a river, in the United States that divides boundaries for two cities, right? Here the other side of the river is still the same city. During our drives we went through several cities that just went on forever. There is one city in particular that is 100 km long that we drove through on our way to and from Odessa. The city branches off of the freeway for that 100 km. Through this whole stretch of city you can only go 60 km/hr which is approximately 35 miles/hr. That would be why, what would have taken 4 hours in the states, took us 10 hours here. :) The memories we've made though!