June 9, 2011

From Slava:

We are not comfortable using public transportation like trolleys and railcars. We walk a lot. There are lots of stores, restaurants and small cafes. Kiev is a very nice European like city. We went to Kiev's history museum. Its a beautiful building, located inside of a park, with large size exposition. Very educational for Alec and interesting for us. However, we needed to walk a lot and it was very hot. Exhausting. But we took nice pictures and had a good time after all. Funny things about museums here, you have to pay extra on top of the admission price if you want to take pictures. We took pictures standing next the the carriage that belong to Russian Queen, Elizabeth II (Peter the Great's daughter).

For lunch we found a nearby cafeteria where we had 3 course meal with one beer for only $12 for everything. It's very cheap and food was amazingly good. Real home-style cooking. This place just opened for business and probably had special pricing. Good for us.

At 4 PM we went to SDA office to pick up documents for adoption. There were lots of people over there and it took us about 1.5 hours to finaly hit the road to Izmail. Our driver was waiting outside all that time. We comfortably fit into 8 seat VW minivan. Our facilitator sat in the front seat and we sat in the back. Alec fall asleep pretty soon and slept for about 3 hours straight. The road was nice all the way to Odessa for about 4 hours. From Odessa to Izmail it was very bumpy. The roads in Ukraine most of the time are in pretty bad shape. I felt sorry for the driver and his van. We arrived to our hotel at about 1 AM. Our hotel is very good, up to American standards and very clean. Stay tuned, we will write about meeting our little boy in the next post.