Found a chocolate shop

We found a pretty good chocolate shop today and loaded up on sugar. It is right across from the bakery I posted about a few days ago (GPS: 54.866002, 69.142828‎). Worth a stop in if you have a sweet tooth.

Turkish Chuck’e'Cheese

We had dinner a couple of nights back at the Petro version of Chuck’e'Cheese. Otherwise known as the “Turkish Restaurant”, it served a combination of Turkish food and a good selection of “American” food like hamburgers and pizza. Everything is just slightly off though as if they couldn’t resist adding a Kazak spin to it. It was decent food though.

The highlight for our daughter Sam was the playground where she spent most of the meal.

And just for fun the Google map via GPS (54.873458,69.131320):

Baby “pod”

The kids in the baby house all live in groups of 10 or so in a set of rooms or “pod”. This is the one where Darya is currently.

Darya's Room

More pictures of Darya

I promised more pictures of Darya so here they are.

Petropavlovsk Baby House

There are three orphanages in Petropavlovsk that serve all of northern Kazakhstan. They are divided up by age and the one for the youngest kids (up to approximately 4 years of age) is called the Baby House. At any time there are up to 80 kids in residence although not all of them are up for adoption. Right now they are not full fortunately.

In all it is a pretty depressing place even though they are in the process of renovating it and bring it up to something that can be called modern standards. The older sections are definitely falling apart although I bet you could find a number of retirement homes in the US that looks pretty much identical. So it is more a statement on how societies care for their less fortunate than anything specific to Kazakhstan.

I’ve posted some pictures in this gallery to give you an idea. Most of them are of the outside. I’ll try and snag a few of the inside at some point. They are best viewed in full screen mode (click the little square in the bottom right of the picture when you roll over it with your mouse).

Introducing Darya

We’ve been visiting the baby house for a few days doing our “bonding” with our to-be new daughter. So here is the first picture of Darya (we are still discussing a name change when we file the official paperwork with the court next week…more to come on that front).

She is 14 months old and has been at the baby house for about a year.

The process from this point forward for those who are not familiar with how Kazakstan adoptions work is that we spend 2 hours a day with her for 14 days and then our dossier is submitted to the court. Approximately 10 days later we get a court date and the judge makes a final decision on the adoption. Assuming it is granted, there is then a two week waiting period for any final objections to be raised and five days for paperwork with the Kazakstan government and the US government. Then she can come home.

It is a long, involved and rather frustrating process but you just need to suffer through it.

I’ll post a gallery of photos in a couple of days.