Leaving for Almaty on Sunday!

That's right, we have our tickets purchased and we are good to go! We should get Max's Kazakhstan passport on Friday and the Natashas will file our application for his exit visa that same day. We will wait in Almaty for it to be processed, thank goodness! When Max heard the news, he was this ecstatic...

He is as ready as we are to move on to Almaty! Once we get there, we only have a couple of things that need to be taken care of (as far as we know). That means we should have lots of downtime for excursions and we have been told there is LOTS to do. That puts our countdown at around 109 hours until we take off, that's just about 4 and a half days!

We thought we were headed to the Sulpak market today, but we ended up at a different open-air market entirely. Natasha said that the weekdays were not very crowded, but it seemed jam-packed to us. And since we had Max in the stroller, we were constantly being bumped around by the locals who were in a great hurry. People here generally do not have the same perception of personal space that we have, so it is a little jarring to be in a crowd in Kazakhstan. We felt very overwhelmed here, so we did not stay very long. We are going to try to visit Sulpak tomorrow (when we were there to get the crib and stroller, it was not nearly as busy as the market was today).

One interesting thing happened while we were at the market today. We ran into one of Max's orphanage caregivers. She was thrilled to see him again, but Max seemed a little distant. We were a little surprised by this since Max tends to reach out for people that he doesn't even know very well, like Alan and Melinda whom he has seen all of three times now and sometimes he'll even reach out to complete strangers. We know that his reaching out to others is a sign that the attachment process still has a long way to go. Obviously, we do not let him go to those he is reaching out for because he needs to know who his Mom and Dad are.