It's amazing what you can do with the internet. Really. I can remember when, as a college student, I heard of this new thing called the web that made the internet a lot easier and more interesting to use that just doing ARCHIE and VERONICA searches. I even got a copy of this new program called Mosaic so I could surf... on a 2400 baud modem... blazing fast (or not). That was back before Netscape, before internet explorer and way before broadband... I'm showing my age. Even so, I am still amazed at the things you can do online these days.
We wanted to be able to write and send cards to our kids in Russia. The translator told us that the address of the orphanage was on the adoption agreement... but he never showed us where or told us what it was. The agreement is in Russian. We're trying to learn some Russian, but it's a little tough. There just aren't enough similarities between slavic languagues like Russian and germanic languages like English to make it easy. Needless to say, reading the adoption agreement to find the orphanage address isn't something we could do anytime soon. And than in comes the internet to save the day.
I can read enough Russian to recognize a few words, so I found a part of the adoption agreement that I thought was a good candidate for the address. I went to an online translation site and was able to type (using the Cyrillic alphabet via a Russian keyboard emulator that is on the website) the part of the form I suspected.
It translated to something along the lines of Special Childrens Home for abandoned children and children of parents who do not support them. Obviously the translation was a little awkward, but it was enough. I had the the right part and it included the street name and building number. I was on my way to sending mail to детский дом 12 (children's Home 12) in Stavropol Russia.
Next, I needed to learn how to write an address for mail going to Russia. I found a couple of resources. The first was actually the Russian Postal Service and it was in English. The other was the US Postal Service's international addressing tips page.
I also learned that I needed the postal code (think zipcode). The Russian Postal Service has a page for finding these, but it's not all that user friendly... it's in Russian only. Still, I managed to find the codes for Stavropol. The "Main" post office in Stavropol is 355000. Finding the correct post office for the orphanage was tougher and involved some divine intervention. We were able to decipher from our internet translated adoption agreement that the orphanage was on Trunova Street (ул. Трунова, д.71). It turns out that one of the local post offices is also on Trunova Street. Digging out our map of Stavropol that we bought over there in July, we saw that it wasn't a very big street. Looks like we found the right post office! The Russian postal site even has photos of the post-office branches, so we've included the one for "our" post office above. It's Ставрополь 7 and there are more photos if you follow the link. The postal code is 355007.
So far we've sent post cards and a letter. The rate is 94 cents for a typical letter in case you are wondering.
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