Arrived in Moscow safely

We arrived 30 minutes early, just shy of a 10 hour flight. Neither of us slept for more than hour or so. We watched Spiderman 3 and Meet the Robinsons...there was a lot of turbulence this time. It took us 45 minutes to go through Russian "passport control". We met some other couples that are adopting while in line, one was from K.C. Of course, we were discrete about discussing this as we didn't want any Russians to overhear, we've heard they are not all for adoption. Luda was waiting for us outside of the baggage claim and then her and a driver took us to the Moscow Courtyard Marriot. We found out from Luda that Sveta, our english translator in Abakan, won't be making the trip this time. She had a conflict with her other job. They will be assigning a translator from the Abakan courts (don't worry mom, it'll be fine!). We are disappointed though, because we felt comfortable with Sveta. We checked in and slept for about 4 hours, until 5pm here. We then went downstairs and ate at the Flatiron grill located within the hotel. We had big American hamburgers and fries. We will just take it easy in our hotel room tonight trying to recover from the flight. It's raining and cold here today (50's), it will be warmer in Abakan (upper 70's and 80's). Tommorrow we will walk down the street to a neat breakfast place called Coffe Mania, we ate there several times on the first trip...great omlettes, pastries & coffee. After that, we plan on touring the Kremlin (Russian government and museums) because we weren't able to see it on our first trip. We have to check out of our hotel tomorrow at 1pm, but they will hold our bags till we leave. Luda will pick us up at 8pm tomorrow night to leave on an 11pm flight to Abakan. We'll try to post tomorrow before we check out.