Electronics, Tools and Toys

For those of you who are about to make this journey we have decided to talk about what has worked for us and what hasn’t. First get a Ukrainian cell phone. They are very cheap. The total for the cell phone itself and about 150 minutes was $64.00. In this plan you get free incoming calls and free calls to anyone else with the same company.

The second thing that I would do is get a Skype account for online phone calls. If you are calling computer to computer there is no charge. We decided to get US phone numbers for our family and work to be able to call us for free. These accounts cost $15.00 for each line for three months. In addition we set up the account so that when we are on the computer we can answer the phone and those call cost two cents per minute. When we log off the computer we set Skype to forward the calls to our Ukrainian cell phone. These calls cost about 15 cents per minute. In our opinion that is worth it to have the support of our families. With this you will need a headset that also has a microphone.

We brought a laptop but you can use internet cafes. They are plentiful even in small towns. If you are not bringing a laptop go to an internet cafe once you have your cell phone and forward your Skype account to your new number.

It’s heavy, it was the one thing at customs at the airport that got lots of questions but we have used our 500 watt converter many times. We got ours through Magellan’s travel magazine. Not the least expensive place to buy one but it is good quality.

I’d also say don’t bring your blow dryer or curling iron (Teresa disagrees) these will not work unless you have the above converter. And for the $12-15 each I’d buy them here. Fox Mart carries them but is a little more expensive than at something like a hardware store. Teresa just didn’t like the time and effort it took that was also the day I ran the hot water out of the shower before she got one. Our current hotel has a blow dryer just like many in the US would. Most adoptive parents seems to rent apartments rather than at a hotel. Generally this is a better way to go. But in the small town we are in the hotel seemed the better option.

If you are bringing lots of electrical items get 2-4 of the little adapters. These are not converters but seem to work well at charging electric razors, cameras, ipods, mp3 players and computers. Most laptops are built to handle electrical current worldwide.

Do get a little hand held camera/video recorder. The one we bought was about $120 plus we bought a 4 gig card for extra memory. We can record about two hours of video plus thousands of pictures. It really is no bigger than your fist. I hadn’t been shopping for a while and was shocked at the size and quality that is now available.

Being a tech junkie I brought an external hard drive to store all the pictures on. It is probably over kill but I like it. And it takes a small amount of space and weight compared with much of what my wife brought.

We also bought some devices called empower that are supposed to work in the handle of many planes so that you are not operating on batteries until they go dead on the flight. The plane that we were on was older and did not have these even though the airline had assured us that it would when we called them.

The last items are probably not needed but we are justifying it by calling them scream insurance for the trip home, a personal DVD player with a ten inch screen. We also ordered some Russian language DVD’s, some online and others at the Russian bookstore in Denver. Mostly cartoons.

We brought at least five set of earphones/earbuds. Several splitters so that multiple people can watch either the DVD or Computer together.

Several of the USB/Camera cables, always have a backup in my opinion.

We also brought a small color printer (3 inches high by 6 inches deep by 12 inches wide, loaded the computer with plenty of games and clip art/coloring books that can be printed out each day for the kids. It also makes it possible for us to print out an additional copy of any item in our dossier. We had this advice from a family that traveled about four years ago. They said don’t tell any official that you are making a copy, just tell them that you left it at the motel/apartment and go print it out. This won’t work on items that were apostilled with a raised seal.

We also brought a variety of paper in a box about the size of a ream of paper. Labels for the photo albums, picture quality paper as well as plain white. Many of these are available just in slightly different sizes.

And we also bought a small scanner that is just barely 9 inches wide and about the size of four pencils wrapped together. With this any of the documents that we are transporting but not allowed to keep we will have for the kid’s records later in life.

I’m not advocating doing anything illegal. Just hoping to speed things along and keep all records for when the kids have questions when they are older.

I’ll post pictures of these items in our attached photo album.