Josh and Becca Thrap and Family

I’m never gonna get through our whole trip at this rate and I can tell that I’m already forgetting some details! Not that I write all the details anyway, but whatever, moving on! So! When I stopped last time we had just visited the school and all the teachers were asking why they never hear from their American friends anymore. We walked home from school and briefly checked in with Tania before heading out again to be picked up by a friend that I hadn’t heard from or been able to contact since 1996! GALA!!! She and her husband Garik picked us up and drove us to a cafe in nearby Essentuki. Her English was still really good and I learned that she had been a teacher for a while but now she runs a children’s shop in Kislovodsk just up the street from the bazaar! Garik didn’t talk much, but he made sure that we experienced all the best that the cafe had to offer! I know I can’t even remember everything that we ate, but I do have pictures of most of it! After lunch, we drove back to K’vodsk very quickly and Gala showed us the places where we used to picnic and Josh got to experience another Narzan site. We had to get back for our evening plans but we arranged to get together again before our departure.

Gala dropped us off back at Tikhonenkos and we were just in time to catch our next ride! We squeezed into Teacher Tanya Azova’s car along with Alla Dremluga and her now tall teenage son and they drove us to the Castle of Love and Betrayal. Tanya regaled Josh with the story behind the name and now he knows why men say “ladies first!” The whole castle area is much more developed as an “attraction” than I remembered it, but we still had our picture taken on the bridge where all the wedding parties go. It was dusk by now and my camera really doesn’t like taking pictures at dusk so many of my pictures from this trip are blurry. We stopped again for more Narzan and then we headed back into town for some ice cream! We ate at a nice little place right behind the grand theatre overlooking the shopping street below.

am I forgetting anything important?

My previous posts about our trip to Russia this past October only covered about half of our trip, and then I started to get busy with holidays and birthdays and such and kinda just figured “oh well, nobody really cares about seeing all our trip pictures anyway.” And then while we were traveling and visiting families etc over the Christmas break I was really surprised at how many people were commenting on enjoying seeing the pictures and wondering about the rest of the trip. So now that things are kinda starting to slow down–at least during the week a bit, I will try to finish posting about our wonderful time in Russia. First, to give a better idea of where we were, I’ve found some map images online. The first map shows Russia in relation to the rest of Europe, you can see Moscow, and down to the south is the area between the Black and Caspian Seas. The second map is a closer view of that southern area. You can see Min. Vody, where our local flights arrived and departed, Piatigorsk, one of the bigger cities we visited, and Dombai and Mt. Elbrus, the mountains pictured in my “Spot Josh” post. And Kislovodsk (although not shown) is located in that small area of gray just southwest of Piatigorsk between Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria. Some of the pictures from our travels into the mountains are from these areas.

Ok, so we left home on a Wednesday and I’ve posted up to the next Wednesday which was the day that we went to the school. School No 2 is the sister school of the Muscatine High School, where Josh and I attended. I spent the entire second semester of my sophomore year as an exchange student at School No 2, and I visited again the summer between my junior and senior years, and went back for the entire schoolyear after I graduated 95-96 to help out in the English department at School No 2.

The building hasn’t changed all that much, and many of my teacher friends were still there too!

We just had a moment to meet with Nonna who is now the principal, and then we were taken up to a very large classroom where students of many ages were already gathered and seated and waiting relatively quietly for us. We answered questions for about a half an hour or so and then were swarmed with requests for autographs and short messages in english. We felt kind of like rock stars! When the teachers had finally cleared the room we were taken to another room to have our pictures taken with the senior class, and then we had a small visit in the teachers lounge.

Josh seemed to really enjoy the experience at the school. It was really cool for me just to be back there and to see so many familiar faces, it made me sad that the teachers there–who work so hard for practically nothing, explained that Americans don’t come there anymore and that for most of the students we were the first Americans they’ve ever seen. They are still very interested in all of the friends they’ve met through the years of exchanges with Muscatine, and hope to continue and expand the relationships in the future.

Well hello 2010. You kinda snuck up on me. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll be calling you “two thousand ten” or “twenty ten” or some other bizarre nickname, for now I leave it to my readers to insert their own voice in reading you, 2010. You know 2010, you have some big shoes to fill. 2009 was an enormously eventful year for us! We were so busy that a lot of stuff never made it onto the blog. I guess that will be my resolution this year, to do a better job of keeping up with the record of our lives as they happen via blog, correspondence, photos, and scrapbooking. We did manage to sqeeze in a quick family photo session before 2009 ended. If you haven’t received a copy of our family photo, don’t worry, you may still, I have great intentions (as I do every year) to mail them out. I may need some addresses though… But I will insert the photo here also so you can see–like a sneak peak reward for reading our blog! Josh and the kids love to tell the story of what we went through to get this picture. Of course there was the usual amount of fretting over corresponding outfits for everyone etc, but the part of the story that they really like is that in order to find a clean backdrop for us all I made Josh pull the couch away from the wall. Then, in order to place the camera high enough to use the timer feature and get us all in the shot, I had to stack wrapped present boxes on top of the electronic piano box that is living in our front room all in front of the couch without having them topple all over the couch or backwards into our Christmas tree. You probably had to be there, but the kids and Josh got a real kick out of watching me set up the camera just so and then having to hop up and over the couch without knocking anything over and sqeezing into my place on the wall before the camera took the picture. There were a couple times I didn’t make it. But keeping them amused seemed to work well enough for getting pictures with nice sincere smiles and I had a keeper with all eyes open etc after only about 6 takes!

For the first time in over four years Elise has consented to cutting some bangs. I’m hoping somehow this will help her take better care of her hair and just might keep some of it out of her food at mealtime! I also let her change her earrings this week for the first time in over a year since she had them pierced!

Today, Elise is 9. Yeah, we had a party, and then we had dinner at the Texas Roadhouse where both Jacob and Elise were put up on the saddle and “Yeeeeee-haw”ed at. They also got to open their presents from Aunt Sarah and Uncle Scott who joined us for dinner.