The other day, I wrote about people who were putting some part of their adoption journey into video format. But I realized, as I was poking around YouTube afterwards, that video sharing sites can serve another useful purpose: As part of the process of educating the child you adopted from Russia on the country of his or her birth.

I started, of course, by searching for videos on the Russian cities nearest and dearest to my heart: Vladivostok and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on Sakhalin Island. And, as you might expect from an Internet search these days, there were videos to be found.

Not all were suitable for children, at least not children the ages of my two. There were a few videos of expat parties (eminently forgettable, as most events by Americans abroad tend to be) and Russian girlfriends. My Vladivostok search also turned up one post of street children living in the city, shot by an outreach group based in New Zealand. It brought back all sorts of memories of the street children I had seen in the city in 1999, as well as worries that this could have been the life of my son had his birth mother not left him in capable hands.

But I could, by carefully previewing and bookmarking the files in advance, show my older son a patriotic event (with the girl's marching in improbably high heels), kids doing street gymnastics and even a perhaps unintentionally silly video of winter driving skills in Vladivostok. There was even a short film on the city before it was opened to the West in 1991, which looked much like the Vladivostok I visited. I skipped the videos of Seo Taiji, a South Korean singer who apparently has something of a following in the Russian Far East. But since many of the videos were matched by MP3 music files, it was a good way for my son to hear some current Russian music, too.

You've got to preview these files carefully; there's a lot of junk out there. But they could provide an interesting take on a world our children want to get to know. Have you used YouTube or one of the other video sites to help your children understand Russia? I'd love to hear about it.