Day Before Court

Well, today was our last full day here. Since we can't visit LM on Sunday we spent a lot of the day cleaning the apartment, doing laundry, packing and taking one last short walk around Astana. We also needed to review our speeches for court tomorrow.

After talking to Tim and my mom, we headed out to dinner. Our original plan was to go to Venezia in the old TsUM store, but then we decided since it was little chilly and windy and we still had to come back and finish packing we would go someplace a little closer to the apartment. We had seen from the Drake's blog that they really enjoyed their meal at East-West and it is very close to our apartment so we decided to go there. We walked in and who was eating at East-West, but the Drakes who had returned with their 9 year old daughter to pick up their son on Monday. He is in the same group as LM and really looked like he was ready to have his parents return when we saw him on Saturday. It was nice to meet them in person. When you read someone's blog for so long you start to feel like you know them. For anyone coming to Astana, East-West is definitely worth a try. It is now our favorite restaurant here. It looks like it could be high-priced, but is very reasonable with Kazakh, Russian, Indian and Italian food. It is near the Ramstore, but on the other side of the bridge.

Tomorrow we will have our last visit with LM in the morning, then it's back to the apartment to get ready for court and maybe one last quick trip to the President's Museum to be sure I've gotten souvenir I wanted. We have court at 5:00 and then it's off to the airport to catch our plane to Almaty, hopefully with some time to stop back at the apartment to change clothes. Wish us luck at court and hopefully we'll soon be introducing you all to our new son.