Wow... I guess we do still live in Russia?

I was thinking the other the day.... that I felt really badly that I have not made any updates in quite some time... and I decided I wanted to make a commitment to get more active again... but before I started, I needed to get at the root cause and figure out "why"?

Moving to Moscow has been a weird experience... because life is really not a struggle anymore. We have great restaurants in walking distance of our house (in some cases where we are definitely regulars)... the concierges of our apartment building serve as a pseudo-Mom for us, especially as they worry about Sara's lack of proper-attire (i.e. warm jackets, shoes, & hats) for Russian winter... our hi-speed internet is almost fast enough... our Vonage phone works very well... our Slingbox enables us to watch football live every weekend... the groceries in the stores we use a great... in fact - life is better - some stores deliver (no more carrying cat litter home)... and we can restock our wine supply with nothing more than an email message a few rubles...

While work for me gets more and more difficult (too much to do and not enough resources or funding to do it), life overall is pretty good. We don't forget how lucky we are to have such a nice set of experiences... and for all the complaining that we may do (mostly to each other)... this has been a good experience (better in Novomoskovsk than Moscow, honestly, but that's a different story).

But the bottom line is... life in Russia, while a struggle from time to time... does not feel so different when you are living in Moscow. Net - I think I stopped writing because things just do not feel so different anymore. We've settled into a very nice groove here... and while we are looking forward to our next change (we are in the process of buying this lakefront property in Shickshinny Pennsylvania)... life in Russia has become... routine. Until this week...

Anyways... the "oh... wow... we really are living in Russia" moment hit me yesterday / today. Things have been sort of quiet in the country recently (OK - so the government did a bunch of ethnic cleansing of Georgians... and a few Kremlin dissidents were mysterious poisoned via a rare radioactive ingredient... but what do you want for a Monday? Selfishly, these things don't impact me (well - the Georgian restaurants did close for a while... )... that was until December 6.

My office is located in a massive development called Moscow City (this is going to the site of the tallest building in the world (600 Meters)... I work in Naberezhnaya Tower)... one of our office neighbors is IBM. On December 6th... masked people with machine guns show up at IBM (and a few other companies in the city) for an "inspection". For those of you who deal with auditors and and inspectors in your work... you ever have one show up in a full 1970's ski mask and toting a machine gun? Click the title of the posting for the article.