Miri & Margaret

Excuse the chronologically confusing post, I’ve just jotted down headings and filled in the content. The order is somewhat random. We’re struggling to find the time to prepare posts and videos.

We just finished having dinner on the 4th floor which has a stunning view gently filtered by green construction shade-cloth. All our meals were stunning on all counts. Visually appealing and tasted terrific. Perhaps we are easy to please? We met Miri, an elderly Australian lady when we held the door open for her Sunday afternoon. Monday morning we invited her to our table for Breakfast as she was sitting alone. Monday night, we’ve wound up having dinner with her and her Australian friend Margaret by chance. But after all, she did recommended us try the 4th floor restaurant, so it seemed only likely we’d run in to her there. They have come from Magadan (amongst other places) on an ocean cruise. They told a wealth of stories of their travels, but it was so refreshing to have conversation with English speaking people, let alone Australians!

Unable to shake her cold combined with fatigue has left Cassie feeling a bit out of sorts. Due to the really long daylight hours, I think we’re overdoing it a bit. Hopefully we’re all on top of it tomorrow.

After at least 30 minutes hunting around for the shipping company’s office we discovered the Russian addressing system isn’t [Unit Number] / [Street Number], [Street Name] like we’re used to, it’s actually street number first, then unit number. After we crossed over the rail line we found their office straight away. At this stage, we feel prepared for ‘the rusky way’, in the sense that things always take so much longer than anticipated.
Our first visit to the shipping company was greeted with “Hello - Good, I’ll now phone and ask for [some piece of paperwork] from [some entity]. It should arrive by lunch time, so drop by at 2PM for us to continue'”, so we dropped by at 3PM assuming this would naturally take longer… nope, “the paperwork has not arrived yet. Call us at 4PM and we’ll continue.” We called and left a voicemail, and at 6PM received an inaudible call from the shipping lady. Assuming it was her, we emailed and got the response saying the paperwork had arrived and we’ll continue tomorrow. It should be pointed out that each trip to the shipping office is an hour long round trip. Don’t get us wrong, it’s nice to walk, but we’d prefer to get more done than just ‘status updates’. She did set an entirely unrealistic two to three day deadline of having the car, but I suspect maybe she meant just round one of several. We are certainly not getting our hopes up.

On a side note, how awesome is this mobile telephone. I asked ‘Siri’ to set the alarm to 7:30 o’clock. Cassie informed me that 7AM would be more appropriate, so I asked her again. The dialogue is below:

I reckon that’s super amazing! But then again, I am very polite to her, it stands to reason she’s good to me.

I’ve uploaded some more photos from today here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/twomagadan/20120625?authkey=Gv1sRgCNW5mr64-a7QoAE

Probably 75% of cars we’ve seen are all-wheel-drive. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is, even Yaris’s come AWD! And they do seem to have a bit of height about them as well for straddling all that snow I suspect.

 

 

 

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