A little about our first week in Pavlodar!

I will post more photos tomorrow, but mean while I am going to back up a little about our experience here so far…Pavlodar is an industrial city but has a beautiful river flowing through it- the Irtysh River- that is about the width of the Potomac and flows from China into Russia. It is spring here- very, very cold one day, windy and warmer the next- lots of snow and mud on the ground.
The second day we got here was the beginning of a three day holiday for the Kazak people- their new year and celebration of the equinox. Tatiana (one of our translators) took us down to the celebration and there were dozens of yurts set up, lots of music and traditional dancing. It turns out that each yurt was sponsored by a company and “our yurt” was sponsored by a very large building company – they insisted we eat with them so about 40 people crammed into these little tables in the yurt for a feast. Igor, the son of one of the employees, was our interpreter. He is 21 and speaks great English. There were lots of vodka shots and toasts- very jovial and festive. Many of these guys had worked together for over 30 years! They asked Grove to give a few toasts and then they asked me to sing an American hymn. So, I sang Amazing Grace (it was all I could think of) to about 40 drunk Kazakhs! The food was traditional kazakh cuisine….a big platter was served with lots of different meat: pork, lamb and mostly horse….and then they had this disgusting white drink that was fermented horse milk. It was so sour and gross we had to wash it down with lots of vodka. We were treated like guests of honor and each toast blessed the “americains.” Before the end, the master of ceremony made an announcement that he wanted to give Grove a gift, and that is when he took off his traditional Kazakh robe and gave it to Grove, complete with big hat….pictures are posted. There was an artist there who wants to give us one of his paintings….we are going to his studio this afternoon.
The people here have all been so generous and kind and warm to us. Its been incredible.

As for the adoption, our attorney here is Svetlana and she is fantastic. Our first day here, she got two official requirements done (including an interview we had to do with the Ofiice of Guardianship and Care) and cleared the way for us to go to the baby house (the day after the national kazakh holiday celebration. The only child we met at the baby house the first day we went was Pavel. The director had chosen him for us to see. We liked him immediately. He was so cute and sweet, very strong and very healthy and active, and yet calm. We were pretty sure that first day that he was the one for us. We visited with him again the next day and decided definitely for sure that he was the one for us. On the third day, we finally met with the Director, who asked us if we wanted to see anymore kids. They have about 9 kids at the baby house under a year right now. We said no way- we wanted Pavel. We visit with him every morning for about an hour. He seems to be attaching to us a little more each day. He loves to be held. He can stand and roll over and crawl and sit up by himself. Every day we are with him he gets more and more smiley and giggly. It will be interesting to see how his personality unfolds as we all get to know each other better. We have to do the bonding thing through April 4th and then we will get a court date. After court, if approved, we have a 2 week waiting period ...after the 2 week waiting period, we can break Pavel out of the orphanage and then we will have about a week of paper work and going to the US embassy in Almaty before we can head home to the US. We are in a nice and warm one bedroom apt in the middle of town. We have a gym we've joined that is 2 blocks away from here. Its a gym/hair salon- but actually quite nice. So, we are very comfortable. The team we are working with are fabulous and attend to our every single need. We have a driver and a translator (Tatiana) who take us wherever we want to go. So- we actually have it quite good. Sorry for the long entry….more to come soon! I will post more photos tomorrow.