WHERE are you going for your Christmas vacation?

We thought long (too long) and hard about where to go and what to do on our Christmas vacation.  It took us a while to find out when R could be off work.  Because the main holiday for Russians is New Years and their Christmas is celebrated on January 7th their holidays start later than ours.  But, K was arriving for his winter break on the 20th of December and would be returning to the states on January 6th, so we needed to vacation earlier rather than later.  R got permission to be off work starting the afternoon of the 23rd.  Although we had been in the states in October we briefly thought about going to the states for Christmas, until we found out that for tax purposes R had already been in the states for close to his maximum days in a 365 day period.  Our next debate was warm or cold?  Did we want to go someplace warm and bask on a beach or did we want to go someplace cold and take part in some winter sports?  It was a toss up, all of us would have been happy to do either, some days the scales tipped farther one way than the other.  We then ruled out countries that would merely be warmer than Russia, if we were headed someplace warm we wanted swimsuit warm.  Lots of other people want swimsuit warm too and the airfare to places like Thailand go up around Christmas.  Note to self:  save Thailand for a midwinter break.  Then we realized that it was too early to guarantee snow at most ski resorts in Europe, unless they were on a glacier or very far North.  Not all of us have the skills to ski on a glacier.  Most of the resorts in the far North have their very own Santa Claus and reindeer and were booked, who would have thunk?  We were not having much success and thinking of things we could do in and around Moscow.  R's translator and assistant went above and beyond her typical job and found us a ski resort in Russia.  She made flight and hotel arrangements, found out about rental equipment and grocery stores and even arranged a taxi pickup for us.  Thankfully she was only a phone call or email away as we had a few more questions.  There are a fair number of people who speak English in Moscow, even more in St. Petersburg.  But, we have noticed as R has traveled for business the farther you get from Moscow and the smaller the city the fewer English speaking people you encounter.  Our Russian is increasing but it is mainly limited to food items and numbers.  Both of which served well on this trip.  One of the things we have read is that Moscow is not Russia and Russia is not Moscow.  We want to see and do some of Russia while we are here, not just Moscow.  So when A sent us the website and pictures of the ski resort and hotel in Abzakovo Russia, we were delighted even if we were a little apprehensive.  We thought about taking the train, we do want to take a train trip in Russia, until we found out it was 26 hours long.  So we settled for UTair.  I, like everyone else, have read about the airlines in Russia.  But, we were flying into a small airport and our choices were limited.  R travels frequently for business and although he has had some interesting stories, travel by car here is no piece of cake either.  So it was settled we would travel by air to Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the Chelaybinsk Oblast (about 420 km from Chelaybinsk where the meteor landed last year) then we would travel by taxi about 60 km to Abzakovo, a small town in the Beloretsky District of Bashkortostan located on the Eastern slopes of one of the South Ural ridges, Krykty Tau.

Short answer:  We are going skiing in the Ural Mountains.