Moscow- Day 2

Preevyet from Moscow! Today was another long day but we completed important tasks. We both slept pretty well last night and seem to have adjusted fairly well to the time change. This morning Chad was up early (I had been up in the middle of the night) and I laid in bed for a while sneaking in a little more sleep. We got up and dressed around 8am and went over to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. We walked around a bit and found a small market at which we purchased eggs (yaitso), milk (malako), hleb (bread) and jam (jem). We were proud of ourselves that we could find the market in the first place and then accomplish what we had set out to do. The items we purchased were about $20 US dollars. Thus, groceries are expensive here too. We then came back home and I showered before our medical visit. After hanging out in our apartment for a while (and eating some Easy Mac for lunch) our driver picked us up to head back to the US Medical clinic for our 8 doctor medical visit. Traffic wasn't as bad today as yesterday (it wasn't rush hour). We picked up the other couple on our way. Our appointment was at 3pm. We didn't see the first doctor until after 4pm. Then it was five minutes with one doctor, wait twenty minutes, five minutes with another doctor, etc. I had heard that the psychologist may ask all kinds of crazy questions and that they will look very closely at your skin to see if you have cancer. We found the overall process to be long (4 1/2 hours) but not too painful. I don' think the doctors had read our medicals that had been completed by our physician here in the US. The dermatologist told me I had "nice skin". I am not sure exactly what that meant but she had reddish hair and freckles so I think she felt we had a bond of sisterhood. One of the doctors had fishnet stockings and stiletto heels with Barbie-doll like hair and features; she looked as if she was still in medical school. The last doctor we saw was the narcologist (doctor specializing in addition to narcotics/alcohol/etc.) I found it to be amusing that she smelled as if she had just crawled out of an ashtray. An addiction specialist with an addiction... hmm. The neurologist asked us where we were from, and when I replied Illinois in the United States he responded with "I am from here". Then when he asked about our occupations, he blushed a bit and apologized as he felt the quality of his English was poor (he actually did a nice job but I didn't mind feeling superior in the presence of a MD). In the end, we got the paper that showed each physician approved us as being healthy enough to adopt our little Siberian boys. And as a door prize, we got to walk out with the actual chest xrays they took. What? We only had to spend $1600 and we got our chest xrays too? Amazing! After our medical visit we stopped by at the larger supermarket with our driver and bought a few more items for the meals during the rest of this part of our stay (pork chops, peanut butter, butter, bacon, sausage, pasta noodles, marinara sauce, chips, pepper, frozen french fries and a bag of M&Ms) Total bill... $85. We came home and made breakfast for dinner as we were tired and hungry. Tomorrow night we will have fine dining on pork chops. Saturday we are meeting the other couple to walk and do more sightseeing. We are planning to visit a Russian bookstore close by as I would like to buy a traditional Russian storybook for the boys. Sunday we fly out of Moscow at 10:30 pm for an overnight flight to Kemerovo (it lands at 5am). That same day we will climb into the van for the three hour trip to the orphanage and see the boys. More to come....