We are finally back online!! Hooray for McDonald's Wifi. We are sitting in a swivel chairs, on classic Mickey D table tops typing away happily. The joy of finally sending an outbox full of outdated emails is exhilarating!!! Since we last wrote, we have received our permission from the SDA to visit the orphanage and we are taking our paperwork to the local magistrate. We took an overnight train to Krivyi Rih. Our compartment housed 4 beds and we filled three: Me, Brad and our facilitator. The train was actually nicer than our train from Paris to Rome, but train noise is train noise and sleep is hard to come by. In Krivyi Rih, we were able to see Inna and her living space. The girls in her group are very kind and they are all close to each other. 14 beds are in the group room. They have a dance room and an art room. We saw lots of Inna's paintings. We have enjoyed getting to know them. Yesterday, we bought a puzzle and built it together in her group area. We also saw a dance and song performance they did for their teacher's. Friday was a holiday to honor and award teachers. We ate cake and watched them cheer each other with champagne. We were the only one's not drinking, but we smiled and participated by eating CAKE! It was delicious!
The city is bigger than we expected! Lots of pizza places, restaurants, and sport centers with skating and movies, etc. Our facilitator taught us how to make Borscht and I taught her how to make salsa. Bread is made fresh every day and their butter is like pure cream. It makes a great combination and is very hard to resist. When we are alone it is very difficult to communicate because very few people speak English. We had to buy postcards that had 5 different languages on the back, with one being English, in order to figure out what we were looking at in Kiev. So far, we have not found any Kriyvi Rih postcards, but Nadia was our tour guide today. Nadia is an English teacher at the University and she took us to a city museum and an art museum today. We learned about the mining history and Russian culture. Ukraine means edge and is the country that edges all the others. The also call Ukraine - Little Russia. We saw various Ukrainian embroidery pieces, military clothes, medals, and awards.
Since it is Saturday, many weddings took place today. Wherever we went, decorated cars, photographers and brides and grooms surrounded us. On one famous city bridge, couples put a lock on the iron work and through the key into the water to symbolize a long life together. The locks have the wedding date and names of the couple. There were also men selling doves to the wedding couples to release as a symbol of peace and happiness. We saw one bride and groom release their birds together and we watched them fly away.
As we were leaving the church another wedding party arrived to have the blessings of the priest. The couples have to be married first by the local magistrate and then go to the church.
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