Unfortunately, many parents involved in international adoption haven’t spent much time out of their own communities. When they arrive in a place that is new and strange to them, they immediately experience culture shock. We read countless experiences of people who were shocked when the things that they saw in Russia were not the things that they saw in their own front yards. When we went to Russia we were fascinated with the beauty of the natural landscape as well as buildings and cities. Of course, we saw things that weren’t beautiful. But on that note, we saw nothing that we haven’t seen somewhere in the United States. Big cities are big cities anywhere in the world. And they all have areas that need improvements. People in small villages don’t have excess money to spend on extensive landscaping whether it’s in Vladivostok, Russia, or somewhere in Kentucky in the USA. But we saw things of beauty in Russia that we couldn’t have seen anywhere else in the world! The key to our positive experience was that we didn’t go to Russia looking for ugly things. And we didn’t go there looking for things that we could see at home, much less expecting them to be like home. We went looking for the beautiful things that we could only see there. And when that is what we looked for, that is what we found.