Our Friends come for a visit!! Best! Day! Ever!!

                                                            January 16-20, 2014




The airport

"Our" Metro stop

The first Metro ride for some of them!

Best Buddies

Ford's Theater
Abraham Lincoln was shot while watching a play at the Ford's theater.  The theater is currently a working theater.  We were unable to go into the actual theater because there were rehearsals going on.  After the President was shot, they carried him across the street to The Peterson's House.  It was just someone's house but they knew they had to get him somewhere where he could rest and that was the closest place.  This house is now a museum to Lincoln.  They have recreated the room where he died to look exactly like it did at the time he died.  They converted the house next to it into part of the museum.  The 34 foot tower of books about Abraham Lincoln, symbolizes that the last word about this great man will never be written.  The tower features 205 real titles.  The titles repeat throughout the tower and the tower approximates 6, 800 books.  At three stories high, the tower represents just a fraction of the 15,000 titles written about Lincoln.

Spy Museum
We went to the spy museum gift shop but did not go through the actual museum.  The cool part really is the gift shop anyway...

At the gift shop, they had disguises of all sorts, one of which were mustaches.  They were made to put on your finger but, these brave boys put them right on their lips.  I have not laughed that hard in a really long time!

Watch out girls!  One more year and he will be out there breaking your hearts!

Waiting for the metro

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) building

First Day of School

AAS

Anglo American School of Moscow

(The school is a compilation of the American, Canadian, and United Kingdom embassies.)

School playground

February 12, 2014

I asked the boys to stand in front of the door so I could take their picture on the first day of school.  This is what I got from Dalton.  

Here is the second shot.

The elementary and middle schools have to wear uniforms.  Which consists of blue or tan pants and red or white polo shirts.  There are some days where they have to wear a white dress shirt and a school tie.  So far they haven't had to do it but, we have the ties just in case!

Ethan did NOT want to pose for this picture so he kept acting dorky.  I guess this is the picture you get when that happens.

Food part 1

Food

I am naming this part 1 because there will surely be more to come!  I will be making another post dedicated only to bread, also likely to have more than 1 part!

These are some of the items I was able to find at a Russian grocery store!!  WHA???

The green one is with green onions and the orange one is with cheese.  You could probably figure that out by looking at the pictures.

This is mushrooms and sour cream.  Best chips ever!  I ate the entire bag.  It was smallish...

Milk comes in liters.  We have to buy a million of them so we don't run out every day.  Love Russian juice and HATE Russian Coca Cola Light!  It tastes exactly like regular Coke.  SO STUPID!!

This is the closest thing we can find to our sandwich bread.  It is half the size of the loaves we are use to buying.  But the good news is, there are no "heels".  They take them out I guess.  

This is a little piece of heaven.  It is filled with a carmely stuff.  And the only thing better than this is...

...one smothered in Nutella!!!  Oh mama!  

Our first week

First view of Red Square.  -24 F, welcome to Russia! 

This cracked me up.  Dalton and Ethan didn't think it was
nearly as funny as Seth and I did.  Who names a kids toy
company Bullyland?  Hahahahahahah!

Our fabulous friends the Marchenkos!  Liza is just as cute as she was 5 years ago!  They are playing Mindcraft.  Dalton and Seth could not stop talking about how cool Liza's Mindcraft world was!  

                   BEST! FOOD!  EVER!
                                               Second ONLY to Vahe Babayan!

Metro ride home after a long freezing day out in the city.  Pretty rocking shopka he chose huh?!

We went to a museum about the war of 1812.  When Russia stopped Napoleon from taking over, or something like that.  I love that there are people all over the world who are fiercely patriotic and are willing to fight for the right.  I mostly just looked at stuff, I loved the helmets!  I wondered how they kept from breaking off their red fluffy things.

On a side note, when you go to a museum, or anywhere really, they make you take off your coat and check them.  Chris wanted to leave his on cause he was super cold.  They lady told him he couldn't, he had to take it off.  He told her he was very cold and wanted to leave it on.  She fake spat and then said, "And you call yourself a man!"  Hahahahahaha.  SO funny!  Nearly a week later and we are still laughing about that.


Additional pictures from the boy's cameras

They are serious about their cheese!

Must be Mr. Clean's identical twin brother...

St. Basil's.  It never stops looking beautiful.  No matter how many times you see it.

Chris is trying a new hair-do.  What do you think?

This is our church building.  I don't know what it use to be but, the church leases it and they have done some extensive remodeling to it.  It even has a baptismal font.

This is one of the entrances to Red Square.

Cool looking street.  We are at Red Square, the GUM mall is to our left and the Moscow River is to our right.

The boys and I saw this sign in the metro.  I'm not really sure what the sign said but, we are certainly not going to feed a lion our ice cream if we see one.

This is behind our housing community.  It is the Moscow River.  There are a number of locks and the river has frozen so that people go out there and fish and play on the ice.