What a Day!

This morning @ 11:15 the phone rang. Our translator. “Can you be downstairs ready for a taxi in 15 minutes to go the coordinator’s office?” Ryland was in the bath tub (we finally got hot water back around 10:30 AM this morning). We ran around finishing getting ready, bathed & dressed Ry, gathered the rent money and ran downstairs just in time. Taxi mishap…we wait outside for 30 minutes…finally a taxi comes. Once we get to Svetlana’s office we find out the following:

- The passport came!!!!!

- All paperwork to sign out Ryland from Pavlodar is in process and should be complete about 5:00PM

- The Director of the Orphanage is there and asks us if we would please make an impromptu trip to the camp where the other kids are to say good-bye.

- How can we say no???

So we leave the office and head to the travel agent to book our tickets for the 1st leg of our trip home – Almaty! Of course, they don’t take CCs and we already took out our ATM limit earlier this morning to finish up the rent money…GREAT. We had to go to a bank and withdraw money which literally took almost 40 minutes. We had to fill out a questionnaire that seriously asked us if we were the President of a foreign country or the Chief of a foreign army. No…we are just a couple of Americans looking to take out $400…not $500,000…$400. Yikes…good news though – we are now in the bank’s system so they next time we are in town and need to withdraw money, we are golden. (What a relief!)

Then we went to the orphanage to have “Tea Time” with the staff that was still there to say our good-byes. Next stop, the grocery store, so we could pickup drinks and snacks to take to the kids at their camp. About a 45 minute ride out to the camp in a large van with no A/C. Today it was about 95…I can’t remember the last time I sweat this much…I also can’t believe that I am taking the time to type this post before I take a shower…yikes. I feel like I’ve been camping for a week – I don’t even care if there is no hot water tonight! All the kids were so excited to see Ry and it was just like paparazzi. He did not like all the attention/hugs/kissing on him, but was happy to see his friends/family. We visited with everyone for about 45 minutes and then took another hot trip back home.

We finally got back to the apartment around 6:30 – craziness when we thought that we were just taking a quick trip to Svetlana’s office this morning & would be back by lunch!

Tomorrow we will be packing up and finishing up everything else that we want to do in Pavlodar and then Sunday morning we will head to the airport about 10AM. Ry is over the moon to go on the airplane! I know he will think Almaty is America… Poor thing – he just wants to finally get there and see what all the hype is about!!