Overnight in Moscow

We just arrived in Moscow and are now in an apartment. It's actually the "city" apartment of our driver. He and his wife will spend the night in their "country" apartment. Renting us the apartment is MUCH cheaper than us spending the night in one of the "American" hotels in Moscow. It turns out that Moscow has the most expensive hotel rooms in the world. It is kind of neat to be able to see an actual, in use, apartment in Moscow. It's not very big by American standards, but it's quaint and very much a home. The driver's wife even made us dinner and left it in the oven. Very kind of them.

We arrived here at 10:30pm local time at the new (larger) international airport that is used by American Airlines and it took us over an hour to get to the apartment. The new airport is much nicer than the airport we originally flew into (used by Delta). We flew here from the airport at "Mineral Water"... a 2 hour drive from Stavropol. Doing so let us take a later flight so we were able to spend part of the morning with the kids. It was EXTREMELY difficult to tell them goodbye. Gena cried... over the pretense of having to put on his school uniform because the camp was taking a group picture today. He later confided that he cried because he doesn't want Mama and Papa to go back to the US without him. He wanted to know how long it will take for us to finish the papers and come back. He decided that the answer was "too long". He is really ready. Yana became jealous today. When Lisa comforted Gena, it was hard for her. She's been in the mother role for him far too long. It's clear that it's going to be very difficult for her to learn to be a child again and let Lisa do the mothering. It's now 12:30am local time and the driver will pick us up at 8:00, so we'd better get to bed.