Saturday, Sunday and Monday, August 27, 28, 29th, 2011

Wake up, eat, watch tv, go for a walk, read, nap, repeat times three days. Yeah, that’s about it. We were going to go to the seaside Saturday, but Joe didn’t want to. So, we were going to go Sunday, but it was cloudy and rainy all day.

The highlight of the weekend was that on Saturday; they changed the satellite channels so we started to get ACTION TV 1000. This channel runs movies in English!! Granted, we haven’t seen anything from later than 1990, but did I mention it is in English! The low point of the weekend was when we realized; sometimes the movie is in Chinese. Pout! Lots of Jackie Chan’s early action movies. We’ve watched Universal Soldier, Biosphere, something with a young John Travolta, lots of others that are so old or obscure we don’t even know the names of them.

While we’re talking about TV here, I’ll go on. The only English channels we get are the following; BBC from London. BBC is ok, but they play mostly news over and over with hardly anything in between. The news shows are run back to back and they all cover the same stories. If it’s an interesting news day, this is ok, but otherwise not a lot of bang for our buck.

Another channel is the Australian Channel. They play a lot of different programs. We are hooked on a few of the Australian series. Tangled is about ranchers in a small town, Rush is a soap opera type show, City homicide is similar to The Closer or The Glades (cop shows) at home. We also watch The Best of… Which is a cooking show with 3 chefs. They get a topic at the beginning of the show and they have to cook it like a competition. It is always the same 3 chefs. Themes have been; the best potato recipe, the best seductive dish, the best of Australia etc. They send their dishes out anonymously to a 3-judge panel who taste it and decide which is best. I also like Poh’s Kitchen. Poh is an Asian girl who runs around cooking food, often with this old white guy. I am not sure why this unlikely pair is matched up, but I find their recipes interesting. Joe and Clarisse groan whenever I turn this show on. They hate it. The Australian channel also plays a lot of current American videos, which we all enjoy.

Through the satellite we also get The History Channel, which at this point rarely comes in and a Sports Channel, again it is hit or miss with the satellite.

We also watch TB-3, which is like TNT at home. Lots of reruns and shows like Warehouse 13 and True Blood (neither of which I would watch at home, but here, oh yeah!). This would be great—except they are all dubbed in Russian. Sometimes you can hear the English underneath. When they sing (we watched The Wedding Singer) --that stays in English too. Sometimes this is better than nothing.

The highlight of each day is going to eat in the restaurant. We have some simple food in the room, mostly things you can rehydrate with hot water. But going to the restaurant just seems to give you some purpose in life! We only go for 1-2 meals each day as it costs about $30-35 for the 3 of us to eat breakfast, at least $50 for lunch or dinner. Luckily the food is good and worth it.

We are counting down to Sweet pea’s arrival. We should be able to pick her up on Wednesday. We have not been able to go see her on the weekend, as we have not had a driver. This is just as well because although we would love to go see her every day, it cost 3200 rubles or about $112 for the round trip. We just cannot afford it as we already owe the driver over $530 for the three days he drove us around.

Also,  a big shout out to Sweet Pea’s biggest sister Mallory. Yesterday, we received a picture of her first ultrasound. Yes, that is right, I am going to be a new mom this year and a new grandma next year! She is 8-weeks along, so the baby is the size of a blueberry. Isn’t SHE cute? 

 Walking around Vlad Motor Inn