Travel photos

This is the post I thought I was going to write the Friday we were in K's country, but it was not happening. After being home for a while now, I'm more ready to do some of the more light-natured reflection on the week. Though even in this are bits of pieces of the flavor that permeated that week and my feelings about it after being home.

So, here is a random collection of things we saw during the five days we spent in the city where K lives.

First, our hotel. This hotel was perfectly adequate, but not as nice as the hotel in the capital was. (Also much less expensive!) We were on the ninth floor this time. Jon and Anna got their room number first, and were on the eleventh floor. I think that's part of why, when hearing that we were *only* on the ninth we decided to continue our "use the stairs and not the lifts because we can" trend that we had started when on the sixth floor of our first hotel. What's three more flights of stairs, right? ;) Besides, Matt's been talking about needing to start doing some more physical activity so he's ready when we start working on the house addition. He's hoping to put in four 10-hour days as our contractor's "crew" and then get all of his other work-work done in the rest of the week. Here's our hotel from the outside.

 

Looking up (up up up)

 

And the front door. Paving was a big deal to me over this trip. Here, notice that the paving is nice, smooth, very well maintained marble. Notice to the right of the picture the construction tape where they were working on replacing concrete pavers.)

This is what you see when you walk in the main doors. I asked Matt to take this photo on our last day because we went up these grand stairs many times over the course of that week! (They're not nearly as grand once you get up the first flight, but I thoroughly enjoyed this initial approach every time we started up. I also appreciated the way the bottom three stairs continue to the left all the way through the sitting area of the lobby and are the stairs up to the back stair that we took every day to the restaurant for breakfast. And the balance of those three extending far to the left, while to the right they fan out going up seven stairs? Very pleasing proportion. And probably very boring to read about for all of you who are not so interested in what those of us who have been through architecture school call "Arche-babble"!!)

The rooms themselves were not that interesting, with the exception of these two details. On the left is the "main switch." Notice what's sticking out of the top of the Main Switch? Yes. Our room key. Why? Well, because unless your key is stuck in there, there is no electricity in your room. Everything turns off. Even the heat. ;) Not an all bad idea, though, right? And on the right below is the bathroom - very efficient. No luxurious tub like our first hotel. With this one, it's a good idea to set your toothbrush outside of the bathroom while you shower unless you don't mind a few shampoo bubbles when you brush!

Matt and I did as much walking as we could while we were here. The hotel is located on a large pedestrian way lined with shops and other interesting sights, but we also got a few opportunities to walk home from K's orphanage. Being map nerds, Matt and I had already the first night tried to track on an aerial photo/map the route that we had taken in the car to and from the orphanage. By Tuesday we had it marked out and realized that it was only one mile - even less than we had estimated! (Probably because the blocks, a subconscious reference point, are smaller here than in our midwestern US cities.) So Wednesday afternoon when Filip was driving Jon and Anna and their little boy to a medical appointment, and thus didn't have room in his car for us (nor would there be any point in our sitting around somewhere while they had their appointment), we told him not to call the cab he offered to us and said we'd walk home. He was a little surprised. We asked if he thought it would be unsafe to do so, and he recovered and just told us with a smile to "look both ways before we crossed the street." ;)

You get SUCH a different understanding of a city when you walk it then when you're only in a vehicle.

We started by walking around behind the building where K lives. It is HUGE! There's a whole wing to the right that you can't see in this photo.

Then came the fun of walking past some smaller residential streets. We didn't take too many photos, but I thought the gate and fence outside of this house's garden was too pretty to pass up. Despite so many buildings and streets literally falling apart, there are also places that are very tidily maintained, even if they are more of an exception. There were a few gardens where I could see the spring flowers just starting to peek through - tulips, hyacinth, daffodils - and I would LOVE to see what those places look like in mid-May!

Around a corner were these "lovely" Communist-era apartment buildings. Nothing inspiring here. There were many places like this around the city. It's exactly what you hear about the Communist government coming in and tearing up anything that has any character or history, and replacing it with something concrete and depressing.

Getting closer to the downtown area we saw this neat side of a building. The photo doesn't capture how neat the textures and patterns were, so you'll have to take my word for it. Notice also the lines running above all the streets - the public transportation (primarily buses here) run on these.

  

One of the first things that you see when you enter the pedestrian way from this end is this large war memorial from the early 20th century. It has quite a presence, particularly because it is surrounded by pedestrian ways and not crowded by other buildings. Really neat metal work and LOTS of old cannons around this place!

  

Behind us as we looked at this impressive monument was this:

 This building has obviously seen better days. I took a picture of it because it is representative of many other buildings that we saw while walking through the city and is in stark contrast to the stateliness still maintained in the monument.

But then we walked a little further and saw this:

 

A very striking building with lovely flowers just planted in the foreground, and a small coin-operated carousel on the right. I would be interested to see what this area is like when the weather is warmer and children are around. But very likely our trip back to pick K up will not allow for sight-seeing in his city.

We thought this was an ingenious idea for a bus stop! Make it part of the sidewalk! It takes up no room, and hardly disrupts the flow of sidewalk traffic, yet is a very satisfying little "place" to wait.

 

This is very much the kind of building that Matt likes. ;) I found it a satisfying example of a more modern approach, too. The scale and color of the earthy tiles on the side of the building was a beautiful complement to the large expanses of glass. The building sits on a "plinth" of dark stone which houses an (empty, like many) storefront.

The last photos I'll share are of the place where we ate lunch every day. For the equivalent of about $.75 each, we could get a large slice of pizza. Tuesdays and Thursdays were Buy One Get One Half off days. That coupled with an orange from the little market made a perfect lunch, and let us eat at a more "proper" restaurant at supper while still keeping costs down. I'll have to devote a whole post to some photos of one of the menus!

 We  liked being here, walking around, getting  a feel for this place inside of us as best as we could in a few days. Though it's funny trying to make a connection with a place that K has no connection to. He's lived his whole life in this city, and until last summer when they started taking the children outside in strollers for walks, was never outside the walls of his orphanage. I still am not sure how much beyond the orphanage grounds they go, if at all, but enough that his Baba said he used to be afraid of trams and cars, but isn't any more. This IS his culture, and it isn't at the same time. Much like he doesn't (well, didn't!) belong to anyone, there really isn't a place that belongs to him. It wasn't until our last day in the capital when we spent more than five hours walking around and realized that in our whole week in K's country, we had seen only three people with visible handicaps. Only THREE! K's country is not set up to accommodate people like him as part of regular, everyday life. All three of the people we saw (two in wheelchairs, and one who appeared to be blind with a cane) were accompanied by other people who were a necessary part of their getting around. Scroll up and take another look at the photo of the stairs inside our hotel. How is someone in a wheelchair going to get to the restaurant? I *think* there was a lift for the back stairway, but to get to that, one would have to go outside. But wait. Look at the entrance to the hotel itself. It's up three steps. No one in a wheelchair is going to ever be in that lobby without someone else to carry them in. And what would be the point? A wheelchair will not fit into the lifts to take people up to their rooms, nor would it fit through the doors into the individual hotel rooms.

I thought I was maybe being a little too picky about this until emailing a bit last week with someone we know who is from K's country, though now lives in the US. She confirmed what I had felt - the culture is biased against disability to such a degree that K will never belong in his own culture. Even if it changes such that some day attitudes are different there, it will be too late for K. As Matt and I both wrestled the week we were with him with the immense difficulty it will be for K to leave everything he's ever known here (particularly his language), it was a good counter to realize that he is an orphan, not only in terms of having no family, but also having no place to belong.

He will be able to belong here with us - not only because he WILL belong to us as part of our family, but because the infrastructure here is set up to make it work for someone with physical limitations. I know there are many arguments for and against international adoption, and I don't spend a lot of time investigating all of them. What I do know is that right now, for this little boy, we can offer him life and love that he will not have where he is right now. And that is enough for us.