Four hours in Finland

I'm finally getting some pictures put up from our trip to Finland a few weeks ago. We went on March 8th, because we had to leave the country to re-register after being here 6 months. We took a bus to a town near the border, called Lappeenranta. We only had about four hours there- just enough time to see a little of the town and do some shopping. The town is in a part of Finland called the lake district, and it looked like it would be very pretty in the summer! It was a long day on the bus, but it was comfortable bus, and Lydia did very well with traveling.

Here are some pictures.

Birds again

After my last post, I just checked on the internet for info on Russia's birds, and I found that there is a lot of great info on Wikipedia. If you're into birds, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_of_Russia.

It seems that the chickadee-like bird in my last post is called the Great Tit, and the crow is called the Hooded Crow. It looks like Russia has lots of interesting bird species- we just may not see many of them in St. Pete!

For the Birds!

A while ago I promised some bird lovers out there that I'd put some pictures up of the local birdlife... so here they are. Not too much variety that we've seen. Maybe there will be more in the summer, but maybe not, since we do live in a big city. I haven't taken the time to research what these birds are called, but some look very familiar. Here's what we've seen so far.

First, very familiar... lots of pigeons!

Some ducks and sea birds:

Some kind of sparrow:

We see many of these crows here. They sound just like an american crow.

Finally, these look like some kind of chickadee.