Day 20 - Back to See Sergei - Friday October 7

Since Vagif was such a great help to get us to the orphanage on Wednesday we were pretty confident that we could get there again. We got ready that morning, ate some breakfast in our room and packed some snacks to take with us. We followed the same routine as last time to get out to the orphanage. Once there, we tried to find Sergei again, but this time it was a different teacher and he just tried to explain to Vagif where to find the schedule. We went to the main building where their schedule is posted, but it only had what period each class met, but did not say what time the classes were. Vagif asked a teacher that was close by and she told him that they would be switching classes in a few minutes. We went back out to wait for him. We saw some of his friends and they ran off to tell him we were there.

Dad and Sergei at the Gazebo

He came out to meet us and wanted to go let his next teacher know that we wanted him to come with us. When he went to the room, the other children were peeking in and closing the door. They told him that Nina, the director, was in there talking to the teacher, so we would have to wait. We went back outside for a little while and then went back in again to see if Nina was gone. She was just finishing up and came out and spoke to Vagif a bit. Then greeted me and walked off. His next class was English, so his teacher chatted with me a few minutes while she waited for the rest of the class to arrive. She told me her lesson today was on Great Britain, but that she preferred Italy and Greece. She said she had traveled to those countries and also Germany which was okay, but not her favorite. I told her we had been to Rome and Naples and had lived in Germany.
She also was very happy to tell me that Sergei was a good student in English and a very good boy. Of course, we already know that! But it is nice to hear it from his teacher. She gave him the choice to come to class or go with us. Of course, he chose to come with us. I told her I had brought an English lesson book to work with him.

Vagif on the parallel bars

Which is what we did for a while. Sergei and I worked on the first 2 English lessons and Darren and Vagif worked on some Russian lessons. Sergei did super at the English lesson. He has had a strong foundation, so it will be easy for him to learn quickly once we are in America. We ate some of the snacks we had brought. Then walked over to the sport field again. Vagif decided to do some "training" and show us his moves. This caught the attention of a couple other kids. Some of the younger ones tried to do some of Vagif's exercises. Then Vitaly Kuzmin came and did some gymnastics on the parallel bars. It was fun to watch the kids try things out. Vagif, of course, was pretty impressive with his strength. He and I decided he should come to America and be Dad's personal trainer. If only we could do that!

Vitaly on the parallel bars

We watched the kids playing soccer for awhile. Then we decided to play some Uno again. We went back over to where the table was as it was much easier to play that way than on the ground. We all had fun as there were lots of draw two's and draw four's being played on everyone. For a little while Dima joined us. Vagif was listening to his music and Darren was giving him a hard time about several of the songs. We had some really good laughs. Once again it was time for us to leave. Another tough good bye and off we went to retrace our route back home.

This time we had seats together, but there was another guy sitting by us, so we really did not talk much. Darren was pretty tired from working so late the night before and Vagif used my phone for Angry Birds. I tried to doze a little, but could not really sleep. Yarik called while we were on the train. I had Vagif tell him that we would not be back for a while.
When we got off the train, we were trying to decide what to do for dinner and if we should call a taxi or take one that was waiting. Then up walks Yarik. He had come to the train station to meet us. We tried to have Yarik call us a taxi, but never found one that was sent for us. Finally, we just agreed to take one that was sitting there. We had them drop us at the hotel and then we decided to go back downtown to the Ukraine Hotel Cafe for dinner. Yarik had already eaten, so just Darren, Vagif and I ordered dinner. Yarik had tea while we ate. It was really good food. The prices were a little high, but it was nice to have a good meal that was not pizza or sandwiches at the hotel. Plus having Vagif take us on the train was much cheaper than using the bus and taxi to visit Sergei so we had saved enough money to splurge a little.
After dinner it was back to the hotel where Yarik could stay the night as he did not have class on Saturday. This time Darren did not have to work, so we decided to watch a movie. The guys wanted one in Russian, so we found "Joe English" to watch online. It was clean and we could get most of the jokes even if Darren and I could not understand what they were saying. After that, we wanted to watch a movie in English and we chose "Second Hand Lions" that Darren had copied to our laptop. Vagif had seen it and did not last long watching with us. Yarik watched the whole thing and it was getting very late, so it did not take us long to fall asleep after that one.