Welcome to summer below the 60th parallel

Kotlas is above the 60th parallel (as noted before, on the same latitude as Anchorage Alaska), so it tends to be cooler than it is here below the 45th (although they apparently had a string of miserable 90-degree-plus days last summer).

In any case, I imagine Elena will be  spending more time trying to keep cool this year than last.

Our above-ground pool

Helping water the garden

This was at Point Pelee in Lake Erie.  Waves!

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!

What do you do when Dad makes a funny face?
Do you laugh and look cute? Noooooooo.....

Strolling through Russia

Yandex apparently re-enabled their "panorama" view, which is much like Google's street view.  It's pretty neat, in that you can see a street-level view of most streets in Russia's major cities--those include St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Arkhangelsk (but not, unfortunately, Kotlas).  The pictures are pretty crisp; you can pan around 360 degrees by dragging your cursor (as in Google's street view), "walk" down the street using the arrows, and zoom in using the telescope in the upper left, getting a high level of detail.

Here's a few panorama images of the places we were:

St. Petersburg
Right outside the Brothers Karamazov Hotel where we stayed in St. Petersburg
Moma Roma Restaurant, (Italian/Russian/pizza joint) where we ate a few times
Tres Amigos, the South American-Mexican restaurant with the American pop music-ballet floor show
The end of the Gostiny Dvor shopping plaza on Nevsky Prospect
The Hermitage, looking across Palace Square
The Russian Museum
The iconic Church on Spilled Blood
St. Isaac's Cathedral (You can stroll inside the cathedral in Panorama view--pretty cool)

Moscow
The Hotel Peking where we stayed in Moscow
The 24-hour supermarket around the corner from the hotel
Patriarch's Ponds (a park)
Heading down Tverskaya Ulitsa toward Red Square
The corner of the Kremlin
Entering Red Square (this one's kind of fun to "stroll" along)
In the middle of Red Square (St' Basil's Cathedral is in the distance; Lenin's tomb is to the right if you spin)
The New Tratyakov Gallery. We walked here in the rain.

Arkhangelsk
Pur Navolok Hotel where we stayed in Arkhangelsk
Bobroff Restaurant
Central square with the statue of Lenin
Regional Court where we petitioned for parental rights
Dom Knega (book house)
Chumbarova-Luchinskogo Street with its wooden buildings
Supermarket

Whoa. Look what I found.

So, following up on my last post, I was poking around on the Russian search engine yandex.ru.  I thought I'd try to find something more about the Kotlas Baby House, and maybe even find a few pictures that I could add to our album.

And I did indeed find some more information about the Kotlas Baby Home.  In fact, I found an article from last year (dated May 27, so almost exactly a year ago), published in the Kotlas Evening News.  Here it is in Russian, and here's the English translation.  It's about the influx of children into the Kotlas Baby House, how they get there, and how they are adopted.  The article is interesting as it shows some of the Russian perspective on orphan children.

But really, the most interesting part of the article was the accompanying picture.  I thought that little Denis in the foreground looked familiar, like we might have seen him before.  But take a look at the slightly out-of-focus child in the background:

The Russian caption says, "Little Denis, who lives in the Baby Home"

Yup.  That's Elena.  Compare to this picture, taken at the end of April 2011 (so something like 4 weeks earlier than the above picture).

It's not every day you stumble across a picture of your daughter published somewhere on the Internet.

ADDENDUM:


I also found this video, taken at the Kotlas orphanage. It's from 2012, so well after Elena departed.  Correction: The video was posted in 2012, but we recently ID'd the kids as being groupmates of another, older child, so it looks like the video was taken sometime in 2010.

The title is "Ilyina Oksana - Speckled Hen," and I think it's meant to demonstrate educational methods at the orphanage.  The lesson plan centers around a chicken, and includes (I think) identifying parts of the chicken, a little art project, song and dance, and some textural stimuli.  (I'd know more if I spoke Russian.)

But what's really cool about it is that it's taken in the room Elena lived in (I checked: the decals on the wall are exactly the same as in pictures we have). Compare the background (and the yellow dress on the dark-haired girl) to the picture below:

Kotlas: the pictures we wish we'd taken

I just discovered yandex.ru, which is something like google.com; in particular, it has a detailed maps feature, which can be overlaid with some geo-tagged photos. Here's a yandex map, centered on the Sovietskaya Hotel in the center of Kotlas.  Compare that to the Google map in this earlier post of ours.  The cool thing about the yandex map is the sheer volume of the overlaid pictures.

So here are some pictures of Kotlas taken by other people, but ones I wish we had taken.

Here's the Kotlas City Hall; it's right across the street from the hotel.  We did get more than one picture of the City Hall, but this one's taken with snow on the ground, something we didn't see.

This is apparently a picture of a branch, but it's taken in the small park right next to the hotel on a nice sunny day.  I took a few pictures in the park here, but they were all at the end of the day when the light was failing.  This picture makes the park look much more inviting.

This building in a couple blocks south of the hotel.  The first floor has a supermarket we went to more than once (the upper floors have apartments).  Wandering through a supermarket is actually a good way to learn a little about the place where you are.  The supermarket here was well-kept and well-stocked.  The colorful banner on the outside is advertising.