Adventures of Two Sisters, One Brother, and a Mom: More Of Our Moscow Adventure....

I got some more photos posted from our Moscow portion of the trip. Hopefully, this evening, I can post photos from Sakhalin. Below are the kids on the very long ride form the airport to the apartment. We got to Moscow in the evening on a Sunday, and we got caught in heavy traffic. Apparently, many of city dwellers have country homes (Dachas) where they go every weekend. This is common throughout Russia. Even many poor citizens have small shacks where they stay on weekends. They tell me that the people like to grow vegetables and flowers and just get away from all of the pollution of the city. On Sunday evenings the streets all have severe traffic jams. It probably took us 2 1/2 hours to get the short distance from the airport to our apartment near Arbat Street.

Big A and D

Little A Gets The Window

My Cuties

The apartment was rather spacious, and at first glance appeared cute and comfortable. But upon closer inspection, we discovered that the floors were filthy (a huge pet peeve of mine), and it was roach infested (an even bigger turn off!!!). The children's socks turned black after walking on the floors! That was when I shut down--I was ready for our trip to be over. I can't stand filth. Theresa is a total OCD, neat freak, so she immediately set about mopping and disinfecting the bathroom-- fortunately they had cleaning products ( I guess they just ever use them). That helped, but not enough. Also, the tiny elevator leading up to the flat smelled of Piss! Human urine, not animal urine! Yuck!! Below are some photos of our Moscow digs....

The Kitchen

The Living Room

The Front Hallway

(after mopping)

The apartment had a tiny European washing machine, so we decided to do some laundry. Since we had no dryer, we hung everything up--all over the apartment. I had to take photos....

Airing Out The Laundry

The View From The Apartment

The Street Below

View From The Balcony

The apartment was very close to Arbat Street. That is a very touristy section of Moscow-- lots of restaurants and tourist shops. It was pretty neat. There was also a pretty nice park close by. The kids enjoyed that much more than they enjoyed shopping.