Trip to Ukraine

On a nine hour flight you do some silly things. One that I did was to watch" Horton Hears a Who". That is not really so silly because I love that movie.  But to get to my point.- as the people of Whoville say,"We are here, we are here, we are here", well we are here, not in Whoville but in Kyiv in Ukraine.  The trip was long but uneventful which is just what you want.  It was nine hours to Bankok then a two hour layover, then about eight hours to Istanbul, a three hour layover there and then two hours to Kyiv. Our body clocks are still trying to catch up. I woke at four this morning and was unable to convince my body that it was not 11.am. Charise went to bed at 6.00pm last night and managed to sleep till 8.00am this morning.  Everything went fine with our luggage and visa entry.

Our apartment is very nice and comfortable and bigger than we expected. We are on the second floor of a six floor building.  We are told that it is a Stalin era building and that is good because building standards dropped considerably later on.  From the outside and the stair wells etc it appears that no money has been spent on the building since it was built,but inside the apartment it is very nice and cosy. Our next door neighbour is the Kyiv Zoo but so far they have been very model neighbours with not a sound from them. We are on one of the main streets of Kyiv but in the flat it is very quiet.

We have been out and about today stocking up our pantry and visiting the school where we will be working.  There are only 150 students so it is quite small but nicely set up. Because we do not plan on having a car while we are here we will be doing a fair bit of walking and this morning we were walking along the edge of  a park which is opposite our flat when Charise caught a movement in the grass quite near to us and there was a little reddish brown squirrel looking very cute.  At the moment it is raining lightly but the temperature has been quite pleasant since we have been here.
The adventure has begun.