Stoltzfi Shenanigans: July 2010

I am writing this on Monday morning, July 5. We leave Saratov tomorrow, to start our journey home. We will take an overnight train to Moscow, celebrate Katie's tenth birthday and spend a few days seeing the sights. On Friday, June 9 we will board a 4 hour train to St. Petersburg. We will spend the weekend there, taking an overnight train back to Moscow. We will have one day in Moscow where we plan to meet up with our friends, Kate and Ann from Nizhni Novgorod. On July 13 we board our plane for our 11 hour flight back to the states!

Our feelings are mixed. In many ways we are VERY excited to come home. We miss our home, our friends, and our family. We miss steaks on the grill, speaking English without having to carefully choose our words, fitted sheets and many other things that we take for granted in our country. On the other hand, it is very hard to leave. We have met some wonderful people here in Russia. We thought our last few days here might be a bit boring (just waiting around to leave). Instead, our telephone has been ringing off the hook, all of our friends have been calling wanting to see us one more time before we leave.

We finally made it over to Engles (the town on the opposite side of the Volga). A student took us to a swimming beach there and we had a lot of fun. We are planning a last visit to our favorite pastry shop tonight, a quick stop at Bookberry to pick up a book for the train, and a last visit to the covered market to pick up some snacks for the train.

We have been abundantly blessed by our time here. We have made new friends, learned about living in another culture, and been touched by the hospitality shown to us. I'm thankful that we have no regrets - I don't think we turned down any invitations that were made to us, we tried new things (kvass!!!), we resisted the urge to hole up in our flat (especially in the winter). The kids are glad we came, we have grown stronger as a family and we have lots of new friends who we hope will come to visit us in the States.

I am not sure if I will be able to post anything in Moscow/Peterburg due to internet access, but I will certainly add thing when we get home. I'll conclude this post with some photos of our time here, enjoy...