referrals

Today we went exploring a little.  Right across the street from our apartment is an old fortress that is now some kind of hospital.  It is really old and interesting, we took some pictures that I will post later.  Then we decided to brave the Metro, we studied the map and had it all worked out, walked to the proper station, and then could not find where you actually get on the darn thing!  We did find a great underground mall, but no train.. then we decided to eat lunch at a Ukrainian cafeteria that Nico recommended.  Jon was brave and tried some kind of cabbage salad (very tart he said), meat balls in a reddish sauce that tasted "fishy", and a meat filled belin-kind of like a crepe on the outside but rolled up like and eggroll.  That was his favorite, he said it was really good.  I stayed simple and got a cheese belin and an apple belin, both with a little dab of fresh sour cream, very good!.  Then we walked back to the apartment to wait  for our cab.  The driving here is at best chaotic.  People turn, back up, and switch lanes whenever they feel like it!  We met Yulia at the SDA to pick up our official referral papers for the kids.  Now we have permission to ask the orphanage director and social services in their town to visit them and move forward with the adoption.  We decided to stay here until Saturday evening so tomorrow we can go sightseeing ( all the stuff we didn't see today )  This time I used Google maps to figure out where to go.  There are street signs here, but they are all in Cyrillic and hardly anyone speaks English.  So tomorrow we are going on a walking tour of the city then back to the apartment around 3pm to clean and pack, then to the train station for our overnight journey.  We should arrive at like 6am and our new facilitator Sasha will meet us and get us settled into a new apartment.  The days are VERY short here, it gets dark at 4:30!  We enjoy reading your comments, Keep them coming PLEASE!!