Day two-revisting Kara's adoption

From my adoption journal:
November 8 2007- When we arrived in Ukraine we were not told what to do or how the airport worked, and we sat for 30 minutes wondering how to get out since we had no idea where we were staying in Ukraine. First off, our luggage was lost, and Tom ran off to complete the forms to find it. However, this was after we sat in the lobby trying to get through customs. A kindly soldier told us to put Hotel Dnipro on our customs form and we were out the door. We walked out to a sea of people all holding up sings and I am sure we all three had eyes the size of saucers seeing all of them and trying to find our facilitator. Finally, we saw a sign with our name, "LIVARIO" and we met Anatoly, who literally grabbed our carry-on bags and ran out of the airport, he kept telling us to hurry and we tripped through the parking lot to his late model Mercedes. Though we felt intense relief at finally having someone take charge, he was a man of few words, well maybe because he only knew a few words in English.

He told us we did indeed have our SDA appointment the next day instead of the 13th as we were told before we left. That was a relief, but we were both uneasy about the next day and neither of us knew what to expect, we had mixed messages about the SDA.

After being deposited in our apartment (riding an incredibly rickety elevator), we were relieved to see a pretty little apartment and a huge bed. Meghan fell asleep pretty quickly after lunch and slept all day; it was a bad mistake, she was up all night.

We tried to sleep and rest, but jet lag hit us hard, 9 hours difference and their night was our day. Tom ventured out before Meghan or me, I was not ready to go out on the streets of Kyiv, they intimidated me. Tom went to Mc Donald’s and got us some food, he also scoped out an internet café so we could post to the blog. He brought food and water to the room and I opened the water quickly and took a drink, quickly spat it out, it was GAS water, whoops, he had to go back to the corner store and get non-gas water.

We were staying right off of Independence Square and it was pretty busy on our street. I sat in the window and watched the Ukrainian women walk by hoping just one had on a red coat like mine; I did not want to stand out like a sore thumb. I can’t believe how happy I was to see women in red coats! Everyone had told me all the women wore was black, but it was far from accurate, at least in Kyiv.