New Beginnings

The four of us all piled into the back seat of a little yellow taxi.  Nothing like bonding right off the bat!  We drove the 50km to the seaside town of Varna were we needed to spend 4 hours before we were scheduled to fly to the capital city, Sofia at 9:30pm.  The driver dropped us off at the mall and we made a bee line for the food court.  We had eaten a fruit cup at 9:00 that morning and it was after 3:00pm.  Eliana and Justus said they were not hungry, which I could believe after what they had just been through, but we ordered them food anyway.  My favorite food in Bulgaria is Shopska Salad which is their famous dish.  It is tomatoes, cucumber, Bulgarian cheese, and parsley, with a vinaigrette.  french fries are Justus's favorite right after Shopska so we got him an order of fries and he ate both his salad and his fries.  Now that we were full it was time to do some shopping.  There were a few things we wanted to bring home from Bulgaria one of them being a supply of Bulgarian cheese to use on salad and the other was a hefty stash of Milka chocolate.  We also wanted to purchase them each a pair of pants so that we would not have to take care of that once we arrived home.  They loved the mall and the escalators!  It is these little things like getting on an escalator or using an automatic water tap and hand dryer in the bathroom that are second nature to us but are new for them.  It is so much fun experiencing these simple firsts with them!  At 7:00 we got back in the Taxi and headed to the Varna airport for a late flight to Sofia.  It is only a 45 min flight thankfully because it was our 5th flight that day and we were very ready to crawl into bed!  At this point we had been on the move for over 30 hrs and felt like we may drift off to sleep at any time.
It was Eliana & Justus' first time flying so I think some of the excitement of this new experienced over shadowed the sadness of them leaving their home.

 They went through security like champs and thought it was quite humorous to take off their shoes and put them through the scanner.  We didn't have to wait long before we were bused out to our plane.  It was a short 40 min flight to the capital city of Bulgaria.

The kids have motion sickness issues and so by the end of the flight they were not feeling too well. Our adoption agency was waiting for us in Sofia and gave us a ride to our hotel.  Bulgarian drivers have no regard for people who are car sick they drive with crazy corners and lanes changes.  Even people who don't get car sick get car sick there.  We got to our hotel after and hour of city driving and checked into our room.  I wondered how the first night with our new babies would turn out. We had bought a few snacks at the mall so we broke out the snacks before getting ready for bed.  This was the first time we were together with no translator by our sides but we managed to communicate that they should dress for bed and they did so.  They slept better than any of our first 5 babies their first night.  In fact they slept the whole night through and we had to wake them in the morning in order to get to the hotel breakfast in the morning.