Hap-py New Year!

Greetings from the far side of the sea! (Black Sea that is)
It is a cold new year's eve here, but we are warmed by your prayers and love!

We understand that New Year's here is quite the blow out- literally. We have been warned to expect fireworks going off everywhere. We had a small preshow last night in front of out hotel. Some of the local young men set off a few rockets. We had a perfect view from our window. We expect to see even more tonight. (maybe for most of the night)

Kids are doing great although we have lost our regular playroom with Gideon -- it is now the doctor's office. They are letting us play in the old doctors office and we are grateful to have a heated place to be, but it is pretty cramped and there are lots of things we have to keep Gideon out of. I guess it is giving us the chance to set boundaries and enforce them. (we are discovering how exhausting that can be :-)

• Here is a brief list of some of the funniest things we have seen here:
  Babooshka's (grandmothers that look like they walked out of Fiddler on the Roof) riding bicycles.
• Babooshkas riding bicycles in the snow.
• Horses pulling carts driving right next to cars on main street downtown
• All of the kids are bundled up like the michelin man -- so much so that they can't even bend in the middle.
• There are more stray dogs than children in this town -- no kidding! -- and their favorite pass time is to run out in front of Viktor's van (We think Viktor is running a side line business of running down dogs and then selling them to the local resturants for meat. Did we mention that many of the menu items say "Meat with mushrooms" Or "Meat in pasta shells" with no indidcation of what kind of meat it is? Just a joke folks!)
• With my hand in the air, this really happened: We saw a smallish dog walking down the street carrying a blue plastic bread tray (like buns are stacked in at the store) in its mouth. If we had had the video camera out we could have made money off the video! He was just trotting down the street with the bread tray that had to be as big as he was out in front of him. (Okay maybe you had to be there but we were all dying laughing. I'm so mad that we didn't get a picture).
• Bras stacked on a table for sale in the open market, as in tables set up out on the street. (I could just hear the salesperson, "Would you like to try that on?")
• Fish as long as your arm for sale in the open market and they are still alive when you buy them -- talk about fresh!

Well that's about it for now. We are going to Kiev tomorrow to meet Kathy and Nancy's group to get our paperwork so I doubt we will have chance to post anything. The snow has just started up again here so maybe we will have a white New Year.

By the way, I realized today that Santa doesn't actually have to get toys to all the kids in the world in one night. He does Western Europe, Brittain, the Americas and probably some of Asia on Dec 25. Then he gets 2 weeks to regroup and does all of Eastern Europe, Russia and the rest of Asia on Jan 7. And here you thought he was already on vacation! (Hee-Hee)

Peace,
BLN&G