There is so much to write about, I thought I'd just write it once. We left on Saturday at 3pm. Fine flight to NYC-JFK airport. Flight to Moscow was no problem except I got very little sleep. Arrived in Moscow to discover that no one was waiting for us. Apparently there was a lack of communication between our social worker and Russia, and our coordinator whom we asked to pick us up, did not get that message.

So there we were, wandering the airport with taxi drivers following us saying, in a low voice, "taxi?" and when you said no, they would reply in a deep low voice, "maybe later?" I felt i was being propositioned! We went to the Marriott booth and asked if there was a car available. For 60 US dollars, there was. Then a taxi driver (who had been following us incessantly) offered 50 US dollars to take us himself. We accepted.

His taxi stunk like loads of stale cigarettes and cheap cologne air freshener. Ick. We watched our first views of Moscow through the steamed, then iced-over windows. Did see ice skaters on the river, which was neat as I'd always heard about it. After one wrong turn, we arrived at the Marriott Grand.

They held our passport for "registration purposes" and we went to our 3rd floor room. I took a shower - heavenly! By now it was "all the sudden" 1pm Moscow time, 5am EST. I decided I wasn't going to waste an afternoon and wanted to walk to Red Square, which was only 20 minutes from our hotel. We bundled up and went.

It took us awhile to figure out how to cross the street - there were under-street passageways but we couldn't find the right doorway. We finally made it and came up the hill, directly across the Square from St. Basil's. OHMYGOSH! It took my breath away, not the least because I had just walked for 20 min. in teen-degree weather!

We walked the length of the Square, stopping to take pictures of the wall, the Kremlin, Lenin's tomb, and lots of St. Basil's. In Old Russian, "Red" means beautiful. This was very surreal - I had seen many old videos of goings-on in Red Square, military parades and the like. We were both amazed that we were actually THERE.

We walked back to our hotel, by now being 5pm. We stopped at a street vendor and bought some Coke. This was our first experience with non-English speakers. We had to say "Coca-Cola" about 3 times, pointing to the bottle, then held up 2 fingers... luckily we had exchanged some dollars into rubles (exchange rate: 28 rubles to 1 dollar) and so bought our Cokes and moved on.

We had a burger in the lounge (12 bucks American!) and went to bed. We were to meet our coordinator, Mrs. Zhanna, in the lobby at 7:30am sharp for our flight to Ekaterinburg.