The Swedish are Coming! The Swedish are Coming!

One nice thing about the Blogger software is that it allows us to track, in a general way, who's looking at this blog.  We started it with friends and family in mind, as an easy way to let people know how our trip to Russia was progressing.  However, this blog is indexed by search engines, and a fair number of people find their way here through a search engine.  That's actually really fun - I've had email conversations with half-a-dozen people who we didn't know previously, who had "met" us through this blog.

This isn't a huge number of people - this blog just topped 7000 pageviews, which is relatively tiny as blogs go - but that's OK.  We're talking about pretty specialized subject material, and there's not all that many people who might be interested.

One of the stats Blogger coughs up is the country of origin.  As you might expect, most people reading are from the US - about 65%.  Most of those are probably people we know.  Of the other countries, Russia is, again as you might expect, high on the list.  But it's in the third spot.  The second-most number of people come from Sweden.

Sweden? Why? Well, there's a general answer and a specific answer (more after the cut).

Generally, it's these guys: Barnen framför allt ("Children for All," if you want the translated version).  They're a Swedish adoption agency, and they just began, last year, a program for Russian children (translated version) in a couple regions in Russia.  One of the regions was Arkhangelsk, with children from the Kotlas baby house, where Elena lived.  And I can see from our blog stats a fair number of people accessing this blog via http://www.google.se/, the Swedish-language version of Google, with queries relating to Kotlas and the Kotlas orphanage.

As an example of a Swedish family traveling to Kotlas, here's an issue of BFA's in-house magazine (it's a large pdf file, so be patient) with an article written by Annika, one of the first people to travel to Kotlas with BFA.  It's a trip report about her family's journey through St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, and Kotlas.  They visited at the beginning of August 2011, about two weeks before we went on our second trip.  For those of you who don't speak Swedish, you can translate by cutting and pasting text into Google Translate, but it's something of a pain. However, if nothing else, the photos in the article are fun.  I won't copy them here, but compare the picture of toys in the article to this one from our first trip:

Oooo... I see a magic backpack! (April 2011)

And compare the picture of the "plant room" to these two:

Plants in the sunroom (April 2011)

Elena playing in fountain (August 2011)

I find it really interesting to read about other people experiencing the same things we did, and to find out what their reactions were.  For example, Annika notes with interest the Russian tradition of wedding parties traveling to the historical monuments of the city (cf. this picture we took of the statue of Peter the Great).

Bride and groom (left) at the statue of Peter the Great
in St. Petersburg (the gold dome is St. Isaac's cathedral).

Annika was also pretty underwhelmed by both Arkhangelsk and Kotlas - a little unfairly, I thought, but then (as she says) Kotlas isn't exactly a tourist town, either.  Then, at the orphanage, when first meeting her son, Annika observes (roughly translated)

It's a very interesting situation, sitting in an office and being observed by other people that you don't know, at an event that is one of the most remarkable in your life.

And that's...pretty much true.

In any case, it's interesting to find out that folks from another country are visiting Elena's baby house in Kotlas, and their natural curiousity is likely driving some of the traffic to our blog (Google Kotlas orphanage, or Kotlas baby house, particularly in images, to see how our blog ranks.)  That's the general answer to why the Swedish are coming en masse to this blog. 

The specific answer, though, is a bit more...specific.  Specifically, a woman (let's call her M) who writes the Elefantgraviditet Blogg (that's the Elephant Pregnancy Blog).  Back in January, M was Googling around the Internet and found a fun and interesting blog (translation) written by an American family (that's us!), about their trip to Kotlas.  She posted a link, and some of her friends followed it (and, as a commenter points out below, we're in her blog list as the "Amerikanskt par med dotter fr Ryssland," which even us Americans can probably translate ourselves).  And I can see from our blog stats that we're getting a fair amount of traffic from M's blog (thats not a huge number in absolute terms, but a decent percentage of the tiny readership this blog gets). We've got a fair number of pictures on our blog, so I think it's of value if someone's trying to visualize what Kotlas and its baby house look like.

M and her family are almost exactly a year behind us in their adoption journey. They traveled to Kotlas in May 2012 (translation) for their first trip.  M's "trip report" in May is thoroughly fascinating, in large part because many of the things she remarks on are exactly the same things we found interesting - the rattling luggage carousel in the outbuilding in Arkhangelsk, the roar of the propeller plane on the trip to Kotlas, the armed guard at the hotel.  We didn't necessarily mention them in this blog, but those are the little details that flavor the entire trip; the daubs of color that suggest the Impressionist scene.  Interestingly, the in-country coordinator that helped us on our visit, Dimitri, also co-ordinated M's visit.  Some of Dimitri's personality - his amusing abruptness and familiarity with the area - leaks through in M's trip report.

As I said, M and her family are almost exactly a year behind us in their adoption journey, so right now they're preparing for their second trip (the court appearance).  Fascinating, again, because we understand exactly what they're going through; the uncertainty and the anticipation.  Another interesting blog is from Cissi (translation); they just had their court date in Arkhangelsk and are waiting to finally take their son home.  These kind of experiences are just what we, and other families here in the US, went through, and it's interesting to see folks from another country experiencing the same thing.  It underlines the "international" in "international adoption."

So, for you folks from Sweden: Välkommen! Se taggar ("Baby house" och "Kotlas") på höger för mer information om Kotlas barnhem (Kotlas barn hus) i Ryssland.  Specifikt har det här inlägget bilder av Kotlas barnhem, beskriver en vad vi gjorde på vår första resa, och detta har bilder av staden Kotlas. Om du ska Kotlas, maila mig!

Addendum: I am, of course, a friendly and altruistic person; however, one of the reasons I added the above note in Swedish was to get Google to index Kotlas barnhem ("Kotlas orphanage" in Swedish).  I was curious to see if that was a valid search term, and indeed there have been a few visitors already accessing this blog with that term.