Our Christmas Trip to Utah - Part 3: Christmas with the family

Our last major adventure in Utah was the main one - our family Christmas Eve party.  Mom had the girls make cookies for the party.  Each girl made a big batch of cookies in a marathon of cooking on Monday (December 23).  They made gingersnaps, molasses crinkles, snickerdoodles, and chocolate chip cookies.  It was a cookie fest.  

Oma felt ill when she woke up, so she put Yulia and me in charge of making sloppy joe filling for the party. I took on that responsibility and accomplished the task.  Mican and Roger's family came in the early afternoon and we visited before going over to the church that Mom had reserved so that we could set up and have the party.

Lexa during her cookie shift.

Eating our Christmas meal.  Grown up table and kids table in attendance.

Burl and Shellee and Brennan came and Aubree and Jessen came a bit later.  Mican and Roger and their kids came. Yulia and I and our four girls were there. Oma rounded out the crowd for dinner.  Ben came over in time for the program.  Suzette and her family were in Boise and didn't make it down this year.

Sixty percent of the kids with spouses.

Ben conducted the program and we had some sharing of our blessings for the year, Nika and Lina played a few songs on the guitar, and Ben, Burl, and I sang "We Three Kings" accompanied by Jessen.  Lina was  finishing up all her requirements for the Young Women in Excellence Award that is being discontinued and playing for the family passed her last requirement.  We are very proud of her achievement and the fact that she buckled down and did most of it in four months.

Guitar sisters!

Uncle Ben conducting.

We Three Brothers

It was raining so we didn't stop and look at all the lit graves in the cemetery.  Apparently that is a new tradition.  We did drive by and look at all the pretty lights.

Lights in the cemetery.

Mican and Roger stayed over for Christmas eve and the next morning our stockings were filled and left on the kitchen table.   We opened our presents from Oma and each other.  After Mican and her family left to visit their in-laws, the girls opened up presents that they had gotten for each other. They all gave each other thoughtful gifts. The rain had turned to snow overnight and so we had a white Christmas after all!

Christmas snow!

Sisters!

Mayos and Sophie!

Christmas morning presents.

Yulia and Mican model the aprons that Oma brought them from Italy!

Pancake breakfast!

The girls give their presents.

We had a nice Christmas with the family!

Sunday morning, December 29, we flew home.  Ben came and helped drive us to the airport.  It was nice to spend some time with him in the car since we hadn't seen too much of him during the visit.  We got to the airport early and checked in.  After hanging out for awhile, we ate lunch at Qordoba and then went and boarded our plane.  We flew to Houston, which was fun since we followed a similar route that we'll take when we move to Texas this summer.  In fact Yulia took a picture of the pine forest area that we will be living in as we were descending into Houston.

We had a quick layover in Houston, a long flight to Frankfurt, a short layover there, and then a six hour flight to Nur-Sultan.  We arrived and got taxis and got home safely early in the morning of December 31st.  It was a quick visit to Utah, but a nice one.  We were happy to be here for New Years with Babushka.

Waiting for our flight in SLC.

Lexa and Mama in their Jazz gear!

Lina is super excited to travel!

Lunch!

Looking at our future home.

Some happy campers on the last flight home to Kazakhstan from Utah.

Trip to Uzbekistan Part 4 - Tashkent

Our taxi's picked us up at 6:00 a.m. to take us to the train station.  We got there and through security and waited for about thirty minutes until we boarded the train to Tashkent.  We were on a train from Russia that looked like it was full of workers coming back to visit home.  The train was old and soviet style, so we felt right at home.  Our trip was about five hours, so we laid down and rested and had snacks  while we traveled. 

Waiting for the train.

When we got to Tashkent, we unloaded our bags.  Our rolling bag's wheels were broken.  We think the taxi driver broke the wheels when he was loading it.  The bag has been with us since our first year in Kazakhstan.  We've taken it back and forth to the US at least once a year, to southeast Asia a number of times, to Europe (multiple times), to Russia three times, and to Georgia and Uzbekistan. I also used it on most of my conference trips to the US.  That bag has some miles on it!

It meant that it had to be carried, which was a job.  We took the subway and then walked to our hotel.  It was about a mile worth of walking, so it was plenty of exercise.  Our hotel was on a side street and was very nice.  It was the most like a real hotel of all the places we stayed.

We needed to get money to pay for food and stuff, but had a devil of a time finding an ATM that worked to dispense money.  Bukhara was nice in that sense.  There were only a couple of ATMs, but they all worked with foreign cards to dispense money.  In Tashkent, there were only a few that accepted cards other than the local ones.  We did finally have success getting the money we needed, though.

Outside our hotel.

We decided to go the "Harry Potter" cafe for dinner.   The decorations were nice and the food was yummy.  It was the most expensive place we ate the whole time we were traveling, but we had a lot of fun and the kids loved it.  We also got dessert for Yulia's birthday a few days earlier, so win-win!

Harry Potter cafe.  Salads for the grown ups.

Kids getting their food in fancy bowls.

Dessert!!!!

Saturday morning we started exploring Tashkent.  We started at the orthodox cathedral, the seat of the orthodox church in Central Asia.  It was interesting to compare it with the mosques we had been visiting.

Cathedral

We walked from the cathedral to an outdoor train museum. The museum had a lot of old soviet steam engine trains that you could climb up on and around.  My great grandfather was a machinist for the Union Pacific railroad and worked on the big steam engines (later diesel) so it was fun to show the kids around the trains.

Starting our train adventure.

After we had seen the trains, we got on the metro and went to the "Plov Center" to eat.  We had heard from our friends that it was the place to go.  We were not disappointed.  The scale of cooking was really impressive, and the restaurant was highly efficient, very cheap, and built to serve thousands at a time.  It was our cheapest meal and nobody left hungry.  We had nice salad, some bread, and a big dish of plov and some horse sausage (something we are very acquainted with from Kazakhstan.)

One of the many big vats where they cooked plov.

The main dining room (it was full, so we were taken to the overflow.)

Eating plov in the overflow.  Notice we also had a regular boiled egg and a quail egg as well!

Plov, in all its glory!!!

After we had our yummy plov meal, we took the metro to the main "Chorsu" bazaar.  Lina and Lexa both got their souvenirs there from a guy.  We had an interesting conversation about religion with the man who was selling.  The bazaar itself was huge and a bit overwhelming (especially for me), but we turned out okay.

We headed back to the hotel on the metro.

Sunday morning we took two taxis to the airport, checked in, and flew home without incident.  We arrived in Kazakhstan and took the bus home where we found that all was well.  Yuki had gotten a tick while we were gone, but Yana, one of my basketball team girls who was watching her, had seen it and gotten her to the vet without problems.

We had a wonderful time in Uzbekistan. Yulia had been a bit leery about going, but ended up very glad that we went.  It was a unique opportunity.  We are more likely to get to Europe again, but we may not have more chances to spend time in Central Asia.

Trip to France - Day 4 - Versailes and Paris

We ate at McDonald's near the metro station every morning in Paris.  They had special French breakfasts (with yummy hot chocolate and little pastries) that was cheaper than the other options around. On our last full day in France, we loaded up on a big breakfast because we had a big day ahead of us.  We were going to Versailles.

To get to Versailles we took the train.  We figured out the tickets and the trains without too much trouble and had a nice ride out through the city to Versailles.  We arrived there at about 10:00 in the morning when things were opening and there was already a huge line.  We had decided not to go in since we had been in lots of palaces in Russia and had seen some of the remnants in the Louvre.  We came for the gardens.  

Riding the train (notice the ceiling!)

The front side of the palace. 

The gardens were huge. We really enjoyed them and walked a few miles on the paths there (all for free).  We were a bit sad that the flowers hadn't been planted yet, so it was still quite barren, but it was peaceful and beautiful and historic.

Looking down from the palace at the gardens and the lake.

Looking down toward the garden and the lake. Men cleaning the fountains to prepare them for the summer.

Walking in the gardens and forests.

Looking back up toward the palace.

Ducks swimming in the fountains/pond nearest the lake.

Selfie at Versailles!

Foxy  lady at the upper fountain.

We realized that the Paris Temple was close, so we looked up how to get there and walked about a  mile from Versailles and found the temple.  It is built to blend in with the landscape a bit, but was still beautiful.  The best part was that it has a large garden inside the compound (there is patron housing, some missionary housing, and a visitor center as part of the compound) that was very beautiful.  The flowers at the temple were growing and the garden was peaceful and beautiful.  We went in to the visitor center and learned about the challenges that had to be overcome to build the temple in France. 

We hadn't come prepared to do a session so we didn't go inside, but we were very glad that we made the stop.  It was a highlight of the trip.

Front entrance to temple complex.

Christus statue inside the garden.

Enjoying the garden and the flowers.

Returning to the train station after our Versailles adventure.

We stopped for lunch at a little tourist place, and Yulia bought a few souvenirs and then we got back on the train to head into the city.  We got off at a different station where we caught a train to go to the Paris Catacombs.

The Catacombs ended up being one of our favorite attractions. The bones of millions of people were moved from the cemeteries of Paris during a period of time.  The bones were placed in old limestone mines underneath the city.  The bones were stacked very carefully and the overall tone and experience was one of respect and peace.  It was interesting being so far beneath the city in the mines.

We waited in line for about thirty minutes before we got in, and spent about an hour walking through the Catacombs.  We exited in a different part of the city and had to walk for a ways to get to the metro system.  We caught the metro to our station.  We stopped by a little pastry place and bought some treats before heading to our hotel where we rested for awhile before going out to our last meal in Paris.

We ate at a little restaurant about 2 blocks from the hotel.  It was modern cuisine focusing on roasted meats of various kinds.  It was a yummy meal.  We were the first ones in the place again (we got there at 7:00) but it was filling up when we were leaving.

These metro trains rain above ground (elevated trains) and were on regular tires.  It was interesting.

Inside the corridors of the old mine going toward the ossuaries.

Stacked bones. Hundreds of piles like this filled up rooms and rooms under the city.

Information about source of the bones.

Pastries in Paris!

Some treats for now and some for later to bring home to the kids.

At the train station waiting to board our train to the Airport.

The train station had scientific equations written all over.

Friday morning we woke up, packed, and headed to the metro.  We stopped for breakfast at our little McDonald's as usual.  We made our way to the main station, transferred to the airport line, and made our way back.  Our flights back to Kazakhstan on Belavia were pleasant and uneventful.  We had a quick layover (about 90 minutes) in Minsk and made it back to Kazakhstan at about 3:30 in the morning and back to our apartment at about 4:30.

We had left Astana and returned to a newly-renamed capitol - Nur-Sultan - and a new "acting president." Interesting things happen in Kazakhstan while we are away. A few summers ago they renamed the airport after President Nazarbayev while we were traveling.

We had a wonderful time in France. It was a nice anniversary trip and we were both very happy that we had the opportunity to go together.  The kids would have loved it, but it was nice to have a couples trip, too.