Thanksgiving & Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day! Didn't know it was Mother's Day? It is in Russia! We didn't know it until we got to church this morning (the Nazarene Church across the street), and at the end of the service they had all the mothers stand up, and they gave us all chocolate. We had a good week, and enjoyed spending Thanksgiving with friends here. We had turkey and all the other traditional goodies. I made the pumpkin pies, and I even used real pumpkin. The canned stuff is hard or impossible to find here. The pies actually turned out to be really good! Here are a couple of pictures from Thanksgiving:

Lydia enjoyed lots of attention and playing with the other kids.

On Friday, we had a training session in the morning, and in the afternoon we went to the Russian Museum. It is a museum devoted to Russian art, and it was very interesting. Lydia spent the day with her nanny. Here is a picture of the Russian Museum, which was once a palace. Many of the rooms are very ornate. You can see the top of the Church on Spilled Blood in the background.

Yesterday (Saturday), we took a little trip by electric train to the town of Pushkin (also called Tsarskoe Selo), which is basically a suburb of St. Petersburg. Some people were having kind of a yard sale, which we wanted to check out, and we took the opportunity to check out the Catherine's Palace while we were there. Althought we've heard the inside is beautiful, we decided to save that for another day and enjoy the rare sunshine outside. The palace is surounded by a gorgeous park and gardens, with ponds, streams, bridges, and little islands. My toes were froze by the end the day, but it was a nice walk. Since the sun is always so low in the sky now, it made for some neat lighting in some of the pictures. As you can see in the following slide show, Lydia slept through most of the walk.