Party time, excellent! This week we had three parties- Mila’s classmate’s birthday party, a progressive party between the post office and customs office, and finally, Mila’s 6th birthday party. Two of these parties were quite fun and the third, well, it was interesting….

Mila was invited to the birthday party of one of her classmates which was held at a local restaurant. It was quite the experience!

The customs party started innocently enough with a slip informing us that our packages were at the central post office. Nothing to worry about, we thought. Little did we know that this was only the beginning of our trip to the land of bureaucracy which is alive and well in post Soviet Russia. At the post office, we received some paperwork that we were instructed to bring to the customs office. Fortunately, the HR director of our school, Lenar, met us there. The location looked like a set for a video game featuring a mech battle or isolated drone test flight with stray dogs lurking about (we counted 9). Once we got inside, the agent explained that our packages’ listed value was above the 500 euro limit (we declared a value for what we thought were insurance purposes). For the next hour and a half, Lenar proceeded to fill out, by hand, a declaration describing all the items while following form letters that were plastered to the wall for guidance. This process would have literally taken me the rest of the day. With paperwork completed, we were instructed to meet one of the customs agents at the post office to inspect our packages. We were also asked to bring screenshots of similar items from Ebay to verify the value of our items (yes, really!). On to stop 3 about a week later(back at the post office). We met the customs agent so that he can take photos of all of our items before putting them back into the package. After some more screen shots and more emails and more documentation, on to step 4 (back to customs one week later, howdy pups!). Lenar joined us one more time to finally secure our final paperwork that we then took to the post office (step 5) where we got our packages! You can take the Soviet Union out of Russia but apparently, Russia isn’t quite ready to abandon the Soviet Union.

We celebrated Mila’s birthday with her friends at the private art studio of the school’s art teacher. She guided the kids in painting a peacock and then we had pizza, strawberry birthday cake, and of course tea!

Alden and Simon also attended an important cultural event, a stunt/monster truck show. Other than the crazy stunts and bad-ass trucks, there was a WWII reenactment and the Terminator going up against a Transformer type vehicle that some of you may recognize. Just don’t call him Bumblebee. We affectionately dubbed the event “Russian Rednecks” but it turned out to be far less rednecky than anticipated. Maybe rednecks only exist in the USA?