Leavin' on a Jet Plane ... Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again :)

Ah yes, just like the song, we're getting ready to go to the airport to head to Frankfurt and then home. YEA! We're pretty excited about being home and seeing Baba and our two sons - the blond son and the furry son. There's just nothing that being at home no matter how great a trip you've had or how comfortable your accomodations are.

Our biggest challenge is, of course, fitting everything into our luggage. We purposely limited ourselves to two suitcases and now we're struggling to fit it all in but we will overcome let me tell you. The greatest obstacle is that the toy chest that we purchased doesn't fit in our suitcase so we'll see how they accomodate this at the airport. I would love it if they had one of those huge bubble wrap machines that we could re-pack it into something more durable for the long haul but something tells me this may not be in the cards. So ... we'll just have to see how it survives the trip.

We ate dinner at a little restaurant just next door called Shesh Besh (looks like Wew Bew in Russian). It is an Azeri restaurant and was pretty good. Their spicy lamb soup was excellent even with the mound of fresh dill floating atop (it's first one on the menu). The other soup we tried was a lamb meatball with a boiled potato that tasted of mint. Not as good. The funny thing is that the English menu had Russian then underneath it the English "translation"which was just the Azeri name spelled out like we would have any clue as to what it was. So ... after asking the waitress if she spoke Angleski and her bringing the manager over and asking him if he spoke Angleski they proceeded to bring out a worker from the kitchen who spoke beautiful Angleski and helped us understand the soup choices. We also ordered the Azeri bread which was very good but decided to pass on the 'special' Azeri yogurt drink (which probably had dill floating it knowing how such drinks have gone in the past here).

For our main courses, we opted for items that we understood like Shish Kabobs. We had a lamb and a veal shish kabob. The lamb turned out to be our favorite. We also got two potato and mushroom kabobs which came with a Russian version of green goddess sauce. Very tasty. We decided to try the Azeri pastries to finish off our meal. They all tasted very similar ... brown, dry and sweet; round, light, sweet and dry; diamond-shaped, light with apricots and dr'; square with sultanas and dry; square, and sweet with poppy seeds and dry .. well .. you get the picture. We decided that Azeri pastries weren't a fav of ours but perhaps they would've been awesome if we had opted for the special Azeri yogurt drink. Hmmm ... perhaps another time. For those of you who may dine here after us, they do accept all major credit cards and our dinner was about $80 including a couple glasses of white house wine. And, they have a no smoking section which was pleasant and air conditioning.

The night before we dined at One Red Square instead of Expedition as we had originally thought. When seeing that a starter was $100 a person and the main course would be $200 a person, we quickly thought that eating in an extreme dining experience on reindeer just wasn't worth it for this trip. Perhaps another time....

We started our evening by heading to a little cafe that's attached to Gum (looks like a hangman symbol or gamma in the greek alphabet ym). We had dined here a few times during the extremely hot 2006 summer. It has air conditioning and an English menu and the decor is modern and fun. We entered and found a table and waited quite a while for a server to assist us. We decided that a celebratory drink was in order and decided on Kir Royals. I must admit that I never expected a Kir Royal in Moscow to outdo their French counterparts but let me tell you they did. They were beautiful and tasty albeit at Moscow prices - $20 per drink. Good thing we brought all our breakfast and lunch food with us to save a bit of money. We also opted for the beef carpaccio which was so beautiful and quite tasty. Our other recommendations for future diners is to try their various risottos. They are fabulous and quite large for a portion. They also have various specials that are quite good. The bathrooms are large and clean and they do accept Visa.

So One Red Square is located obviously on Red Square. We decided to have a nice meal to celebrate signing our letter of intent to adopt Mia. We had another goal for the evening and that was to claim our 900th geocache. We had to solve a little puzzle prior to getting the coordinates for this cache. I had solved the puzzle at home and we clicked on the Garmin before we got to the gates to enter Red Square. Our trusty Garmin was quite confused and wasn't syncing up to the satellites so we went in hot pursuit of the hint - an air vent. Now the challenge with Russia is that there are police everywhere and we've been told that they are keen on stopping folks and asking them for a bribe. You can imagine my stress at seeing a police car parked in close vacinity of where we thought the cache to be hidden. How would they take to some foreigners feeling around inside various air vents?? How would we explain in Russian what we haven't been able to successfully explain to our law officials in the U.S. at times? Fortunately, the cache was hidden just next door to our restaurant and away from the police who we think were just hanging out on a smoke break. This is of me with the cache log that we've just signed. It says the date and our caching name, Tamaranathan (quite creative for a name don't you think) and in celebration of signing our letter of intent to adopt Mia. The funny thing about geocachers is that after posting our electronic log and uploading these photos, we started getting congratulations from various local cachers (local to Illinois that is). We never think we're all that but for some reason folks keep tabs on us and had seen us at 899 and halt (well halt for a few days) and knew we must be saving 900 for something good. When we hit 900, they went and looked at our logs that talk about our adoption and doing this in celebration of our future daughter. Pretty cool that people are so nice. We've also been asked what will we possibly do to top this for our 1000th ... go to the moon perhaps? Hmmm ... it does make me wonder what we could possibly do to top this. I'll have to give it a lot of thought ... perhaps it will be 1000 on the day that we adopt Mia. Similar in idea to our 900th but it would mean that we have a lot of caching to do prior to our next trip which could be SOON.

We popped over to the gift shop that is right next to the church across from One Red Square with the bell tower. (If you plan on visiting most churches in Russia, remember that women need to cover their head with a scarf). This gift shop was a bit pricey but had the traditional Russia dress that I had wanted to buy for Mia.

We found a couple more items for future gotcha day gifts which will make our quests for the next trip so much easier.

Then it was off to dinner. One Red Square is located in the basement of the Moscow historic museum. The prices are typical for Moscow but the food is good and the menu offers the history of the various Russian specialities.

We started with mushroom and gorganzola in a pillow which was absolutely outstanding. I was a little worried that the gorganzola would totally overpower the rest of the food but instead was used sparingly and extremely good (made me sad that Nathan and I had decided to split two appetizers so I had to share :) He had ordered a Kamchatka crab coquille which was okay and my first time having this type of crab.

We went in two different directions for our main course. I had a taste for duck so ordered a duck with orange sauce with a port berry sauce. How could you go wrong with duck? Nathan ordered the speciality fish dish, the Strelet, which made me laugh. First, Nathan rarely if ever would choose to eat fish but he chose this to try something that was a house speciality and very particular to Russia. Once our dishes were served and even after sampling both, I knew I had chosen correctly. And, my dish didn't stare back at me which I found comforting.

We also ordered a side of mashed potatoes and a side of buckwheat with mushrooms both which were very architectural and yes, they had dill sprinkled over the top and on the plate.

It is nearing the time for us to hit the road so I say Das Vidanya to all. Here's hoping that we can actually feel our legs by the time we land at O'Hare!