A recap of our voyage

Our flight from LAX to Frankfurt was a long and cramped one. It was a little over 10hours. I did get up and walk around some and even talked to a Russian/American who was born in Uzbekistan. I didn’t sleep very much as there wasn’t air conditioning for some reason and it was really crowded. I was so glad to get off the plane and ended up walking around the airport for a while to get my blood flowing. We had a 3 hour layover at the airport so we found some chairs in a transfer lounge to chill in till the next flight which would take us to Almaty with a short stop in Astana.

The flight to Almaty was much more comfortable and I slept more. The flight attendants were very friendly, one kept inquiring if I was okay. The fact that we had been traveling almost 20 hours at that point probably showed! I was exhausted. This flight was on an Airbus so it seemed to have a little more room and each seat had a video screen where we could choose a show or movie. The food on the Lufthansa flights were pretty good, too.



We finally arrived in Almaty about 2am local time after over 26 hours of traveling. Getting through the airport was really no big deal, especially after talking recently with Lea, another AP (Adoptive Parent), who recently adopted her son in Almaty. On the flight we were given a white piece of paper, I think it says ‘migrational card’ and simply has space for us to put our name on it and the reason for our visit. We went through the immigration line to have this paper stamped with our entry date. Then we headed over to baggage claim to collect our bags. There is posted information about customs all over in different languages and a couple of tables with forms to fill out. But we didn’t have anything to declare so we just headed for the exit.

We knew a driver would be waiting for us with a sign with our name. This was a little overwhelming as there was a large crowd of people, many of them cabbies trying to give us a ride. We just told them ‘nyet’ and scanned the crowd for our name. Finally, to the right, I found our friendly Russian driver holding a sign with our name, we learned his name is Dimitri. He drove us to the hotel and got us checked in and told us we would meet with our facilitator around 10 or 11 in the morning.

We went up to our modest, yet clean room, took wonderfully warm showers and went to sleep for a few hours. Our room is small, as expected, but it’s comfortable enough and we have a wonderful view of the snow capped mountains in the distance.

Our Modest Room

View from Breakfast area of Hotel sign

View of snow capped mountains from our room