The Accidental "Extras"

Day 3 of the trip:

Fair warning – nothing adoption-related happened today (that will be tomorrow) so only read this if you want to read our account of hanging around a small city in Russia. (If you want to know the actual city, I can't post it here because it is public, but you can email me for more info as long as I actually know you).

Rob and I had a fun day today just wandering around town. We planned to hit some museums and churches and to try some Russian food, and we only partially succeeded, but it was a day to remember. It was the day we realized it is really hard to get around here without being able to read Russian. The Cyrillic alphabet is tricky, though knowing the Greek letters helps us a bit to sound things out (which, of course, is only useful when the Russian word sounds like the English word, but that does happen occasionally).

We figured out that “RESTAURANT” looks like “PECTOPAH” and that opened some doors to us. The key is to realize that a Russian “P” sounds like “R”, a “C” sounds like “S”, and an “H” sounds like “N”. We got brave and sat down at an outdoor café to try to get some lunch (with Russian dictionary in hand). They kindly gave us a menu and we looked though it for a while before figuring out that this was only a drink menu. We looked around and realized – no one out here is eating. It is just an outdoor bar. Luckily, we had seen another place called “Mario Café-Pizza” – it had a picture of Super Mario on the sign!



We saw people actually EATING outside there, so we gave it a shot. When we got our menu, Rob told the waiter “5 minutes please” in Russian to let him know we’d need time to look at the menu (as I held up my little dictionary to show him why). The server immediately reappeared with an English menu. How nice! Though the food was mediocre at best, it is a backup option now if we’re having trouble finding someplace to go. After that, we saw lots of street carts and stuff, so we have that option for the future too (we are here for 3.5 more days so we can’t be eating fancy every meal). And thankfully, Michelle (who was here last year) told us where to find the little grocery store. We got some juice boxes and chocolate for snacks later :)

Our museum plan was to go to the History Museum and then the “Music and Time” museum today. On our way to the History Museum, we saw a crowd gathered and a fire hose spraying into the air. My thought – I hope the museum’s not on fire! But no, it was not on fire. In fact, nothing was. The street corner was being used to film a scene in a movie that involved two children in raincoats walking away from a bus in the rain! The sky was clear, so the fire hose was generating the rain. We stopped and stared for a bit with the crowd, took some photos, and then were on our way...but then we couldn’t find the museum, and we realized that we must have missed it. We headed back and found that the movie scene was still going on – we stopped and tried to get our bearings and figure out where the museum entrance was because it seemed it should be nearby. Then we hear the director saying loudly:

" (unfamiliar Russian words) puhjalste (unfamiliar Russian words) "

The word we recognized means “please” and we realized he was looking at us and gesturing his arm. We were in the background of the shot he was trying to get! Sure, we weren’t really extras in the movie, since the director shooed us away, but it was still pretty cool. Amazingly, we were back that way later in the day and almost got in the way again (they were doing a shot in a different direction, so the previously safe area was now off limits).

We ended up giving up on that museum, since the movie filming was happening right in front of it and we couldn’t figure out where the entrance was. We will probably try again in the next few days depending on our schedule (over which we have no control). Instead, we went to the “Music and Time” museum, which is a private collection of clocks, gramophones, music boxes, etc. The collector is apparently an actor from around here and he conducts the tours himself. The guidebooks all say that his tours are fantastic, and we think it probably was, though we didn’t understand more than a word here and there :) One of the words he said fairly often was “slozhichy” which means “listen”. They say that on our Russian language learning CDs at the beginning of each lesson :) The man was very animated and the others in the tour (about a dozen people) were cracking up a lot of the time. He did some audience participation and we managed to hide for almost the whole tour (we were the only non-Russian speakers). At the end he was getting a couple to come demonstrate something and he tried to talk to us, so we - apparently adequately - said “ya nee puneemyo pa-russkya” (I don’t understand Russian). He didn’t speak much English, but he asked where we were from and we said “we’re American, from Florida” and several people nodded and said “Florida” so they knew where it was I guess (or at least they’d heard of it). Our apologies to our Canadian family – the language learning CDs only taught us how to say “American” (Amerikanyits) and we don’t know how to say “Canadian” for Rob yet.

The other thing we did today was to see a couple of amazing Orthodox churches - one we went inside, and the others we just saw from outside for now. They are the cool onion-domed style, and the one we went inside (Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker) was covered in bright frescoes inside with lots of Bible stories along with other stories we didn’t recognize (it looked like some were probably St. Nicholas working miracles). We didn’t get to take photos inside – the lady may have been telling us “no flash” or “no photos” but since we couldn’t figure it out, our photos are from outside. She did sell us a postcard that has an inside picture so at least we have that.

We’re back in our room for the evening now. Our agency’s translator is going to call us tonight to finalize the meeting time for tomorrow morning. Hopefully we will be able to post in the next day or two again, once we have more news about the adoption. We’ve been trying not to think too much about it today, to keep the nerves down. Please keep praying that all goes well!