Photos from Red Square!

We took Wednesday afternoon to be tourists and visit Red Square. We are going to try to take at least one day a week to do touristy things. There is so much to see and do here.
Stories to follow later this weekend.
Thanks for reading and leaving comments!

Blessings,
Marc

The family in front of St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square.
Marc & Kellye in the same spot...hard to believe that we are really in the heart of Moscow, Russia!
John-John plays on some cannon balls and old cannons outside the cathedral.
Hannah is becoming a natural Muscovite!

Statue to Karl Marx located outside of the metro station near Red Square.


The family outside of the walls to the Kremlin.


Lenin's Tomb.


St. Basil's again...one of Moscow's most famous and recognizable landmarks.

Have I mentioned that I love the snow?

I love the snow. I am saying that more for my benefit than yours. I know that six months from now when it is 90 in Florida and still snowing here that I may not be saying how much I love the snow, so I wanted something in writing to remind myself. :-) It has snowed since around 12:30 today and I love to be out in it.

Today has been a full day. I started my language training this morning. My tutor, so far, is kind and patient. But, man does she move fast. I guess that is what happens when you try to squeeze a year's worth of learning into just 12 weeks. I wish I could say that learning Russian was easy. I wish I could say that it came naturally to me, but both those statements would be a lie. In reality, I find it very difficult and confusing. For example, there are letters that make one sound when used at the beginning of a word and a totally different sound when used at the end of a word--and those are some of the consonants!! However, I am determined to learn it well and to use it regularly so that my conversational Russian is as good as I can make it.

Believe it or not, I have homework to do, so I better keep this short. Keep praying.

Blessings,
Marc

This morning we woke up to...

SNOW!!!

Watch the video.



Well, how 'bout that?? It's the middle of October and we have our first snow fall. And it was a good one, too. You may remember from my previous posts that we have had nothing but rain since we arrived. Last night was no exception. And it rained hard. The wind howled all night long. But, this morning we were greeted to tons of snow falling from the sky. Because it has been so wet and was just barely 32-degrees it did not sticking to the ground until around lunch time. But after lunch it started sticking and by the time I walked home tonight there was at least 3 inches of snow on the ground in some spots! It has pretty much stopped for the night (I think) and the scenery is just beautiful.

This has been a bittersweet day for our team. One of our teammates is leaving tomorrow for the States (and that is bad.) She is getting married (and that is good.) So, we all gathered at our team leader's house for church this afternoon and then celebrated with her as she prepares to return home and get ready for her new life. Even though I only knew here in person for just a week, she will be missed by our family and we wish her well. Did I mention how much we love our team? If not, I LOVE our team. They are an answer to prayer and I am looking forward to the time that I get to minister with them. In the days to come I hope to write some about house church. It is an incredible experience.

Now, it is time for you to pray. Pray hard. Tomorrow is the day I have been dreading. It is the day that I begin language school. Now, don't get me wrong. One of the things I want most of all these days is the ability to speak the language. I long to be able to communicate with the people around me and pray each morning for the boldness to speak the few Russian words that I know. But I am scared about starting formal language training. Fortunately for me, Kellye does not start until next week, so that gives me a week ahead before I immediately fall two weeks behind! Just pray that my teacher is kind and patient and pray that I would have the tongue of a Russian.

We have a busy week ahead. In addition to language training and my weekly team meeting, we must go out and buy some essential supplies: cold weather gear for the family, and a big chili pot for Saturday afternoons. We also hope to carve out some time this week to visit downtown and do the tourist thing. We are hoping to visit Red Square, The Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral this week. We will uploda those photos when we get them. In the meantime, here are a few from our first snowfall in Moscow!

Blessings,
Marc

Our First Photos from Moscow

We have not had much of an opportunity to get out beyond our neighborhood and the IMB Russia business office, but here are a few pictures taken from the windows of our apartment. We live on the 8th floor.

The Moscow Chronicles

It has been an interesting first couple of days here in Moscow. We have only been here for five days, but already we are starting to learn our way around and are getting adjusted to our new life here. So, I thought I would try to recap the last few days to try to give you a flavor for living in the capitol city of Russia.

Let’s start with the weather…would someone please tell me what happened to the sun? We have been here since Thursday evening and it has not stopped raining since we left the airport! The funny thing is, they said it has been dry most of the summer, but that would be hard to prove to me at this point. We did see a few glimpses of blue sky today while we were out and about, and as Kellye was making supper tonight there was about a 20-minute burst of sunshine before sunset. Temperatures have been in the low 50s during the day and in the 40s at night, but fall has set in and that means that it gets a little colder every day. By the end of the week the high temps are expected to be in the upper 30s with lows in the low 30s. And, they are saying we may see snow flurries as soon as this weekend!



We really have spent most of the past five days getting acquainted with our small portion of Moscow. They were not kidding when they said this was a mega-city. One of the guys at the office today told us that if you take the entire population of Oklahoma, Colorado, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri and put them into one city, there would still be fewer people than there are living in Moscow. Wow! The area we live in is around the Pushkin Institute, a small specialized university. Our building is next to one of the dorms, so we see a lot of young people walking in and out, but we have not really had an opportunity to meet any of them yet. Our building itself is rather unique. It was designed to be housing for both professors and students at the Institute. We live in the professor section of the building (our landlady is a professor of geology and her father was a professor as well.) There are just over 100 apartments in our section and they are anything but typical Russian apartments. More on that on another day. The other section of the building was designed to be student housing. However, the building codes changed just before the building was complete and it did not meet code for student housing, so that entire wing of the building is vacant!


We are starting to venture out a little more every day. One of the neat things about this city is that there is a mall at nearly every metro stop and the streets and metro stations are filled with little shops that sell anything and everything you can imagine. Last night I bought a rotisserie chicken from a street stand just down the road from my apartment. I can tell you, rarely have I tasted a chicken that was as good as these are. I cannot wait to go back! Speaking of food…because only one person on our tem has a vehicle, grocery shopping is something that you do almost every day. And you can’t let your eyes be bigger than your arms. I went yesterday afternoon on the way home and picked up what we in America would consider a small amount…and then I had to carry it all home! My arms were aching by the time I got back to our apartment. I learned a valuable lesson: you don’t buy two large bottles of soda and two containers of juice if you are the only person carrying the groceries. Note that in the picture above the metro stops are not labeled. That is because they are farther away that what you can see.

Now, lest you think that we are “Super-Missionaries” and that we are adapting without incident, let me remind you that I have only learned a few phrases of Russian…the main one being “I’m sorry. I am studying the Russian Language. Do you speak English?” So far, I have found only one person who did, and he worked at the chicken stand. Though most people are pretty nice about it and understand that you are trying, some are a little rude. This morning I went downstairs to meet one of our team members who came over to watch the kids so we could go to the office and was in the elevator with just a short-sleeved shirt on. The older gentleman who was in the elevator with me looked at me disapprovingly (because you must be stupid to go outside in this weather without a coat) and then said something in Russian. When I threw out my pat response, he just rolled his eyes at me.

We are also trying to get oriented to our ministry here. We have been to the office twice (once all by ourselves!) to get our papers registered and find out how to fill out expense reports, etc. And on Monday I attended our first team meeting. I cannot tell you how much I love our team. They are all great folks and are doing such fun things in ministry. I will write more about that at a later time, but everybody here has been just great. There are two other couples (the girls have taken Kellye shopping several times and are showing her the ropes of getting around), and there are two Journeygirls. And, in a week or so we will have another single man joining us. Yesterday, one of the Journeygirls from our team sat with the kids for the day while we went to the office. When she left John asked, “When is Aunt Tiffany coming back?” I think we are all going to be fast friends and am excited about what the next year will bring as we serve together.

Well, my friends. I have a million other things to share with you, but my brain is still kind of fuzzy. I will try to post a few more updates this week just to get you caught up. I am enclosing a few photos so you can see a little bit of what our new life looks like. Moscow is not what I would describe as a “pretty” European city like Prague, but God has called us here and therefore it is beautiful to us. We hope you agree.

Continue to pray for us. We miss each of you and love hearing from you.

Blessings,
Marc

A Word About Mail

Just a quick note about mail. We have only been here a few days, so we are still trying to figure out the best way to do things. However, for the time being, please do not try to send packages to our Moscow address. Letters are fine.

In the days to come I will tell you the best way to send care packages and Kellye might even give you a list of some of the things we can use around here. We can get most everything but peanut butter, but everything is VERY expensive.

So, for the time being, we would love to hear from you electronically. We hope to have high-speed Internet in our flat by the end of the week, but I am not counting on it. And, letters to the Moscow address are great. I will try to get you info about the best way to send things in the days and weeks to come.

Thanks again for all your thoughts and prayers. We are honored to be YOUR missionaries in Moscow.

Blessings,
Marc

Greetings from Moscow!

There is so much to tell, it is hard to figure out how to write it all down. We won't have high-speed Internet in our apartment for a week or so, so we are relying on dial-up right now.

Our flight arrived on time in Moscow Thursday afternoon and we are still dealing with jet-lag in our own way. It is almost 8am on Saturday and Kellye and the kids are still in bed sound asleep. I, however, have been up since around 4am. This is my second day to do that! Yesterday, I had a nice quiet time and then went back to sleep from 6 to 9.

We have met two "persons of peace" along the way, so far. The first was the woman who checked-in our baggage at the DC airport. "So there I was..." with 19 bags, most of them overweight, that had to be checked. "You are going one way?," she asked. "How long are you staying?" When Kellye answered that we were going to live there for at least three years, she smiled back at her and never measured or weighed a single bag. We paid the excess baggage charge and we were on our way. And, believe it or not, all 19 bags arrived at the same time and only two of them had been inspected by the TSA. Before leaving ILC, I decided to "seal" all of our Action Packer containers with strapping tape (the kind with strings in it) in the hopes that government officials would be too lazy to try to open them for a peek inside. It must have worked!

We had a pretty good flight. John-John stayed awake the entire transatlantic flight and then finally passed out as we were waiting to take-off from Frankfurt. SB has come down with a sinus infection, so she is feeling kinda crappy right now. The food was not bad. As a matter of a fact, the dinner on the plane was better than the ILC cafeteria!

Our second person of peace was found in the Moscow airport. After getting through customs, we found all of our baggage sitting on the floor next to the conveyor belt. We were told that we should get some of the free carts that are in that area instead of paying one of the porters, who will charge you up to $10 a bag and try to rip you off for even more if they feel that they can. The only problem is that these carts only hold two to three bags each. So, in the end we had 5 carts and at least 5 rolling suitcases that we had to get through customs. We lined all of the carts up at the entrance to customs and waited for the line to go down. About that time, an older, bored-looking customs officer walked by. I can't explain how, but I felt that God had sent him to us, so I used what little Russian I have to call him over and explained that our family was moving here and that everything I owned was on these carts. I told him that I did not know how I was going to get everything through customs by myself. Well, long story short, he asked me a few questions about what kinds of things I was bringing and then let me walk the carts through one at a time until all of our bags were out on the other side!

Traffic in Moscow was horrible Thursday, so we had to wait about 30 minutes for our team leader to arrive. (It took him 3 hours to get to the airport!) We then had to wait another 45 minutes for the van that was going to carry our luggage to arrive. However, we got to our apartment around 6:30 Thursday night. Our team had stocked our fridge with some frozen pizzas and other things so that we would have supper and breakfast for the next day, which was very nice. We unpacked a few things, including John's X-Box, and crashed around 10pm.

On Friday morning we were met by one of our team members around 11 and we got our "Metro Orientation." We also stopped by the office so we could register with the Russian government. I bought cell phones for Kellye, SB and myself (we have to have them activated today...you have to go to a separate store to do that here). When we got home yesterday evening our Moscow boss and his family brought us supper and we were able to fellowship a little bit. It was a lot of fun. It was almost surreal though for us all to be together and realize that we were in Moscow and not Richmond!

Kellye and the girls are going shopping at IKEA for a few household necessities today. I am going to rearrange furniture and unpack some more. I am hoping to get the family to downtown on Monday so we can see Red Square and take some photos. I start with my language tutor on Monday the 15th, so I am going to try to rest some and enjoy the week ahead.

Well, Hannah and Kellye are finally awake. Hannah has been enjoying watching American cartoons in Russian. She is watching Aladdin this morning and the kids laughed themselves silly yesterday as they watched SpongeBob in Russian!

Blessings,
Marc