A pancake full of mushrooms...

How about a pancake full of mushrooms for lunch?

St. Pete is an amazing place. Full of palaces, parks like you might see in a cheesy chic flic, and cosmopolitan European styled buildings. Lots of pink, blue, and yellow multi-storied buildings with gobs of ornate moldings. Right next door might be a slum, a dumpster, or a wall of vulgar graffiti.

Another thing: I'll never gripe about Tyler traffic again. Today it took us an hour to get to the center of town. Cars and buses gridlocked and constantly honking and shaking of fists. Yeah.

This morning Kiefer, Ron, Charlie and I met Galina, a tour guide/interpreter (strike that... brilliant interpreter) to spend about 2 hours in the Hermitage. Our orphanage for the day had kids that went to school, so we had to visit them in the afternoon. The Hermitage is the winter palace for Catherine and for Peter the Great. It's HUGE! We saw original works from Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, (not the turtles) Rembrandt, and Monet, just to name a very few. They say that if you spend 5 minutes at each exhibit in the Hermitage, it would take you 7 years to get out. Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son" was my favorite.

After meeting the rest of the team for a lunch of pancakes filled with mushrooms and cream (?!?) we moved onto the amazing and incomparable #40.

Orphanage #40 houses 44 special needs kiddos and man are they cute. Wow, what a time! Flexibility is the name of the game in #40! Kelle, Olga, and I spent time in a room of 8 or so special kids with various issues. Almost all had some degree of mental retardation and every one was adorable.

The trouble is, when we came, they were so overly excited to have new people to pay attention to them, they not only hugged and jumped all over us, but one bit Kelle on the ear! Didn't break the skin...she's okay, really. But these kids really were sweet and full of play. They nearly had to roll us out of there on gurneys we were so tired.

Kiefer spent time with mostly visually-impaired kids. They were so cute with their thick little glasses! They all ran around yelling "Kiefer, Kiefer." But, they were concerned that Kiefer had something badly wrong with him in his mouth. We call them braces in the states. Ha!

Here's your Word for the Day: "spaseeba" - That's Russian for "thank you."

Love,

Jennifer