Sunday, September 26, 2010

Day One in the Ukraine

Today we slept in and Brad made me breakfast, poached eggs on toast with grape juice and fruit! It was delicious!! We took a walk and explored the nearby church, open market spaces and people watched. The church seemed to be a branch of one of the Russian Orthodox Sects. It was being beautifully restored. It is interesting that nothing is landscaped. There are weeds and dirt everywhere with patches of flowers and manicured fences.

At the church, all the women covered their hair with wraps. One interesting lady was leaving and she turned and crossed herself, proceeded to the exit and turned and crossed and bowed again then turned and took off her wrap and climbed into her Lexus and drove off. Needless to say, Lexus’ are not common faire so she caught our attention. There were many families around the church. One older woman was placing good smelling pots out on a table. It looked as if she would be selling dinner to the exiting parishioners. There were a number of strollers, but most people had only one child. We could hear the chanting hymn like voices coming from the sanctuary, but we did not go inside.

When we arrived back to our apartment we had time to take a 15 minute nap before our driver, Sergei arrived to take us to the Temple and then downtown. Our driver understands more English than he speaks. He bought his van about 10 years ago and has been driving for others since. He is a very nice person.

At the Temple, a meetinghouse was next door. It was 1:30pm and Relief Society and Priesthood Meetings were in session. We met a lady named Oxsana who spoke great English. Oxsana married a Slovakian man, who had joined the church due to singing and traveling as a child. Oxsana introduced us to the missionaries. Elder Jensen was from Kaysville and Elder Obering was from Cedar City. (Our boys will be interested to know that Elder Obering is hoping to play quarterback for BYU when he returns from Kiev).

Both the missionaries were very positive about their experience in Kiev. They said, “it’s difficult to figure out how it works because everything looks old and run down around the city, but the buses are on time and everything falls together and works.” They said if you send a 100 grevnas up to the front of the bus from the back, the exact change is returned every time. Wow! That is a complement to the integrity and honesty of the Ukrainian people!! We were able to get the session times for Tuesday and hope to be able to return to the Temple before we catch the evening train to Krivyi Rig.

Downtown was a party. Lots of people, lots of festive street vendors and lots of Police! It seemed there had been a concert the night before or even earlier that morning. The nearby stadium was filled with Soccer (football) fans. We saw polka dancers celebrating Oktoberfest and a talented Scottish bagpiper. We bought some gelato just off the main square and the lady spoke English to us. Brad remarked, “I guess we are pretty obvious!” We had lunch at an Irish Pub called O’Brien’s (shh, secretly – our driver told us they had English menu’s) J We were not very adventurous with soup, burgers and fries. Our waitress had spent last summer in San Francisco and spoke English well. We enjoyed visiting.

The day was beautiful, the sun was warm and I even got a little sunburned. I feed pigeons crusts of bread from my hand and I picked up some Russian pamphlets/advertisements I thought Matt might enjoy trying to decipher. It was a great day. We returned around 5:30 pm and fell asleep. We have connected our computers to the Internet, and we can get email, but our emails are not going out. Tomorrow we will try to solve that problem. Our appointment with the State Department of Adoptions is at 1:00 pm and then we will have some time with Sasha.