Almaty, Here We Come!

As promised, we said we would let you know what we know, which most days doesn’t add up to much, but here’s what we know today:

We will fly to Almaty this Friday afternoon. We still haven’t heard where we are staying, but are confident that there is a place that will be ready for us. We won’t know for certain if Max’s visa will arrive in time for our flight until Monday or Tuesday, so you will all have to continue to be patient along with us. Believe us, we do understand just how hard that is. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Other than that, we’re just riding the days out here. We now realize that if you have forgotten what we look like, we will be the only ones wearing sweaters in August back home. After a month of temperatures in the mid 30’s outside and low 30’s in our apartment, what we consider cool weather has increased considerably. The other morning we were discussing how we maybe shouldn’t have left the windows open and fan on overnight because it was rather chilly in the apartment. We then noticed that the thermometer in our alarm clock sat at 26 degrees! Brrrrrrrr……

As always, Max is doing wonderfully. He continues to be a very happy little boy that we can’t wait for you all to meet. We’ve discovered that he is rather fond of walks in his stroller. This afternoon Rod pulled it out from the balcony for us to walk down for some groceries and Max’s reaction could be likened to Christmas and Birthday all in one. You would have thought we had just presented him with the biggest gift ever! He was laughing, kicking, flapping his arms, screaming, and crawling around like a mad man. I guess he needs his daily outings as much as we do. We are very happy that he is willing to spend some time in his stroller because it will make navigating airports that much easier and we don’t have to worry as much about him when we are fumbling around for passports and paperwork. Of course there is the little glitch of preferring to be in motion, but he’s gotten much better at sitting patiently for a couple of minutes, especially if you sneak him a cookie!

We’ve also completely lost our desire to cook and so we are using our last few days here to visit all of our favourite restaurants one last time. Tonight was a visit to a restaurant that is nicknamed “The Pancake House”. It has another name that we can never spell, but it has excellent food and an English menu. The Beef Carmen is fantastic, as are the Russian borsht and the ham and cheese crepes. Tomorrow we will either head for the restaurant below the Pancake House (take the doorway on the right instead of the left) which is also highly recommended and is a more traditional sit-down restaurant or the Pizza Bluez by the traffic circle. We had originally thought that it would be difficult to take Max to a restaurant for a meal, but he does really well. Maybe it’s all the action and people coming and going, but he doesn’t fuss (touch wood) and eats really well, plus it is much easier to find something for him to eat when he has a bit of variety from both of our plates.

Well, we’ve got a few things we want to get done yet tonight, now that Max is asleep, so we’ll sign off for now and either post an update on Thursday or possibly not until Almaty, if we find somewhere to access the Internet.

Take Care