Arrival in Almaty - Thursday April 20th

We arrived into Almaty pretty much on time and made it through immigration without a problem although we were a bit nervous. As for our bags, only one was “misplaced” and it contained the generous donations to the baby house from our family and friends. Luckily it was still in Frankfurt and is to arrive on the same flight tonight. We (Laura, Joseph and I) will bring them to a baby house here in Almaty when we return in a few weeks. Today we met with our adoption coordinators to review the procedures and documents and once again everything went great. Our driver, Kirill, is very nice and took us shopping for a phone card, currency exchange (125 Tenge per U.S. dollar) and groceries at the ever famous Ramstor. We took him to lunch for….pizza in the food court – not too bad either. We also received our cell phone for in country use and then proceeded back to the apartment to rest and regroup. You can see from the photo our bedroom which has a crib just waiting for another baby. The apartment is very nice and clean! We decided to eat at home tonight so we could enjoy our purchases of Barilla pasta and sauce – we are easing into things…well we did buy Russian chocolate and bread. Tomorrow (Friday) Kirill is picking us up at 4:45am (that is 5:45pm Thursday in Chicago) for our flight to Uralsk. It sounds like tomorrow we will meet Joseph!!!! We will then be only 9 hours ahead of Chicago – Kazakhstan is big! We are being booked in at the Chagala Hotel in Uralsk – we think they have a website. So we expect tomorrow to be very very exciting so stay tuned!