Plane tickets: check!

So we purchased our airplane tickets last Thursday. $650 USD each for one way to Frankfurt from Atlanta, through Detroit. Not bad! :)

We arrive in Frankfurt at 6 am, and since our wonderful hosts, Diter and Carola, live a few hours away from Frankfurt airport, we will busy ourselves with coffee, food, baggage and shopping until they can comfortably come to the airport to pick us up.

They have also offered to put us up in the best hotel in Loxstedt! Hotel Boerger! Their home :) It will be so wonderful to get to know them, as Cinderella considers them family, and to leanr more about Cinderella herself. See where she spent so many summers, where she played and had happy memories.

Then of course it will be fun to drive with them through Germany, through Poland, and into Ukraine. Maybe we can stop for lunch in Berlin as it is near our path, and get a photo of what remains of the Berlin wall! Or maybe, more importantly, get a glimpse of baby polar bear Knut! I hear he is a big celebrity in Germany.

It sounds morbid, but I am also interested in seeing one of the remaining concenrtration camps from the Holocaust. My family fled Germany and Poland, just before Hitler took power, so this was something pivotal in their lifes and I think I should have photos and the experience to document that for my children to explain why we left Europe for America. We are not Jewish, but I have Jewish friends who are Holocaust survivors - they recently went back to Poland and visited the camp where they were held and their old village where they lived. I have always been interested in Hitler since most of his most crazy ideas and plans were the effect of end stage untreated syphillis. As an infectious disease guru, this has always fascinated me how diseases have shaped history.

Dieter also checked with Cinderella's orphanage to ensure that she would NOT be sent for summer hosting (to Germany, to their home as usual) so that she would be in Ukraine when we came to adopt her. It appears, based on his discussion with the director of that orphanage, that the SDA notified her about our approved dossier and appointment, so she had already removed Cinderella's name from the list - I wonder if this means that Cinderella has been told about our appointment date? I wonder if they contacted Belle's orphanage?

This also bodes well in the fact that obviousely the SDA has approved our dossier for the specific kids we requested. We were worried about that - that Belle was not registered, even though her sister is (LOOOOONG story why they are in seperate orphanages and not registered together)

In SnowWhite news, I wrote the little princess a letter letting her know what is going on with the summer hosting, and that Mama and Papa are working on fixing it, but that we may not be able to. She is a smart cookie - way smarter than most institutionalized kids her age. Very mature, very well spoken, very witty. Usually I "baby talk" a bit to her and simplify things in my letters - I didn't this time. I explained about how, as Americans, Papa and I have little to no power or rights in Ukraine, and that it is her director who makes this decision about summer hosting. Its sad that the director would betray our verbal contract like this - in Ukraine, verbal agreements are as binding as written ones here in the US. Everything in Ukraine is done with verbal contracts- which is probably why they are so disorganized when it comes to paperwork and nothing is documented! LOL

At this point the director is arguing that the Italien hosting group "put in their paperwork first" so it is first come first served....but I am saying that we had a verbal agreement from September 2006 that pre-dates any Italien paperwork. That and I have mentioned the hosting and been working on the hosting paperwork since December in letters to the director and SnowWhite.