How Can My Pants Shrink If We Have No Dryer?!

Ok so this is just going to be my blog entry for the whole week because honestly this past week was the most quiet week I've ever experienced. Monday and Tuesday were both really quiet days filled with babies and joy. We've also graduated from cutting grass with scissors to painting heater shields with wood stain with poison fumes. Big time. Tuesday we had a cooking lesson because... You know... We're not fat enough already, we need to know how to cook ourselves.  Wednesday was the fourth of July which meant we went out to the bar on the pedestrian street and listened to the extremely inappropriate live music while having drinks on one of the psychotic ex volunteers who professed his love for one of us, pretended to leave his phone at the home base, and sent her 5,000 rubles to send it back to him (because sending that to the program director who actually knows how to use the postal service here would have made way too much sense). It was filled with the best people watching of my life and a very informative lesson on how to correctly use chop sticks.  On top of this, we had just come from our excursion to the museum (someone's house) of time and music (bells and creepy bird music boxes) and the teddy bear museum. Now don't let me confuse you. This was not like the teddy bear factory in San Francisco which is a legitimate factory and museum filled with informative posters and adorable teddy bears. This was two very small rooms filled with what I would call vendetta bears who looked like they had all been told one too many secrets by their crazy child owners. I would not want to be alone there at night.  Thursday we were able to interview the orphanage director. Apparently people in Russia don't like to be interviewed since we're all spies. She was very confused as to what we were trying to accomplish through the interview and the first question she asked us was if we wanted to adopt. She asked us in a very suspicious way though. Maybe she sensed that every time we got back to the home base after placement we began plotting how we could sneak our respective babies out and take them home with us. Apparently the facility is government run and currently has 97 children there. People adopt through agencies that refer them there and we were able to talk to a family adopting twins for a bit. Despite the fact that many children are adopted by foreigners, Russians have priority and family members have ultimate priority. Often family members will come visit and eventually adopt. In one case, a baby's parents were 13 and 14 when they had her and now the father is coming back to adopt his daughter. Similar things happen all the time. The staff is often worried about the families the babies go back to won't take good enough care of them or will spoil them rotten. It was really touching to hear how much the staff cares about each child. And the fact that I'm not taking baby Sveta home with me is breaking my heart. I really wish there was a way I could follow up on her to at least make sure she's ok and well taken care of.  Friday was Elena's last day so we decided to go to a "jazz session" (they made it very clear we weren't to call it a concert). It made me want to rip off my ears. The first singer was ok but the ones that followed all sounded like they had bronchitis and had never heard the songs before. Despite the horrific melodies, the words were all in English and were surprisingly comprehensible. Unfortunately the concert went on for about two and a half hours and we had signed out for dinner so we could just eat when we got back, which made the group of Americans devouring the cliff bar like wolves on a moose the main attraction of the concert.  The rest of the weekend was spent exploring and mentally preparing ourselves for the new group coming.