Our Adventure Begins

The Wandering Wesleys departed Houston, Texas on Wednesday, August 17th, 2011 and flew to Tokyo, Japan and then onto Yuzhno, Sakhalin, Russia. The long flights were a bear!! We landed on-time and safely with all our suitcases and Taylor in her dog crate and a booster carseat!

We are getting settled in to our new home in Yuzhno, Sakhalin, Russia. We arrived late Thursday night at 11pm and just got internet yesterday, so trying to catch up on everything.

We have started quite an adventure. The compound is lovely and the people are very friendly. Alyssa is fast at making friends and is running from house to house already. The weather here is glorious, high of 75F and everything is lush and green.

Going into town is quite a culture shock. Yuzhno is an old, run down city. The drivers are aggressive and squeeze 3 lanes of traffic into only 2 lanes and turn right in front of you. I am glad we are not allowed to drive here. So far our experience with the drivers has been fine. Some ladies took us shopping for food and they helped explain where/what to get and can speak good enough Russian to get by. I took my first Russian language lesson yesterday morning, so hopefully I will pick it up sufficiently.

I am new at writing a blog, so I still need to figure out how to make it look pretty and download photos and such. unfortunately, I signed up the blog here in Russia, so the instruction text is in Russian!! I need to fix that......