Fear and Flamingos

This is our second winter and in many ways it has been different from our first.  One thing is that the snow began about ten days earlier this year.  There had been no forecast of snow but we woke one Sunday morning in mid-November looked out of the window and snow had obviously been falling for some time.  The whole world outside our windows was white and covered with about ten centimetres of snow. 

The very first snow of the year.  There were children on sleds in the park and even some small snowmen had been made.  Just twenty-four hours earlier Bill had been able to go for a 4k run in this area.

We had quite a few days then when temperatures went even to double figures below zero. For about a week around Thanksgiving we had snow falling for hours a day.  Because the weather was cold the snow did not melt.  Then we had a period of warmer weather and the snow did begin to melt.  This is where the fear comes in for me. At Thanksgiving itself when we went out to the village we found that there is no snow clearing there and the streets and footpaths would be covered with ice about two centimetres thick. It was extremely slippery.  We were told it was better not to try to lift your feet but rather to sort of slide or almost skate.

We didn't take this photo but this is what it is like walking especially out in the village at Thanksgiving.  The paths are a little clearer in Kyiv itself in most places. In an area like this it is better to walk in the snow and not where people have walked down the middle.

For a few days the trees were even more  beautiful.  There were ice crystals growing on all the branches and so the outline of the trees became blurry. It was like living in a fairy tale  and it was also dazzlingly white.  This is the park across the road from us.

We leave for school in the dark now and arrive home in the dark and street lighting is fairly minimal. As the snow began to melt during the day it would refreeze during the night and refreeze as ice.  We didn't have to far to walk but each step for me was challenging. There are a lot of steps in even three hundred metres! When the ice is white you at least know it is icy and can take precautions but there is often the black ice.  This is where the ice is just a thin film over the surface and doesn't show up with any colour so you put your foot on what looks like clear ground and you feel yourself slipping. I found the black ice very scary.  I didn't know then that there is something even scarier - wet black ice!  For a couple of days we had light rain falling.  The temperature was low enough for the ice to stay icy but it was now also wet!  This is if anything even more slippery!  I was so glad when the temperatures rose a little more after about a week and the ice all melted away.

At the beginning of December we had an unfortunate event :(.  One afternoon we were coming home and were looking through the dimness to see if it was our bus nearing the bus stop. The bus was still about seventy metres away.  Bill was looking up to try and read the number and I had just begun to say to him 'Watch the ice there', when he put his foot on it and over he went. It was a very heavy fall backward onto the backpack he was wearing. We believe he cracked a few ribs.  He is now taking things very carefully as we wait for the six week healing process. 

Right now we have come to Cyprus for eleven days to warm up and refresh ourselves. We are in Larnaca which is on the south-east coast, right on the Mediterranean.  The days have been for the most part sunny and warm. We have enjoyed the walks on non-slippery paths and the beautiful views.  

 The blue sky and the blue Mediterranean. The beach is sand as opposed to the pebbles in Wales and  some of the beaches in France but not quite the white sand of home.

One thing that we didn't know about before we came is that flamingos come to Cyprus for the winter.  About a fifteen minute walk from where we are staying is a large salt lake and when we went there the other day we saw hundreds and hundreds of flamingos in groups scattered across the lake.  They were not close to the shore but you could tell they were feeding flamingos!  We saw one fly in and join a flock and the underside of its wings that we could see as it settled were a bright crimson.

The flamingos stay a reasonable distance from the shore but you can tell they are flamingos.  The salt lake is quite large and we saw many many groups of flamingos feeding.  We read in some of the tourist information that the channel connecting the lake to the ocean closed in 1050! 

We had climbed a small knoll and the white patches and specks on the lake are flamingos.

The birds closer in the foreground are the local seagulls. We think that the buildings and hills on the far side of the lake look like a painting rather than the real thing. 

The temperatures here have been maximums in the high teens.  In Kyiv the minimums are forecast to be in the minus double figures when we return so we are absorbing as much warmth as we can to take back with us.

A local teenager took this for us.  The monument was erected by the Armenian community showing their appreciation for the way the people of Cyprus accepted them when they were fleeing the 1915 genocide.

Football and Food

It is the last day of November and as I type snow is gently falling outside.  The temperature outside is said to be -5⁰ C but feeling about -10⁰ C.  I decided to do a brief blog about the football season here at the school.  Bill was assistant coach for the upper school football team.  The football season is short here because the snow can start any time in November and some years earlier and school basically starts at the beginning of September. There are about eight games in the season and to fit them in sometimes there are two games in a week. There are however very few schools that our teams play against so they play each other usually two times.

KCA is a small school, so that means there are not many children of the same age. To come up with between 11-15 boys or girls of the the same age is difficult. The schools they played against are much larger and so have a considerably bigger pool to choose from. The upper school boys team could come just from grades eleven and twelve but for KCA the largest number in the boys team were from grade 9. This made it hard for them playing against teams made up mainly of  boys from grades 11 and 12.   Another factor for KCA was that we do not have a field for the teams to train on.  We do have a field just outside the school but it does not belong to the school and to call it a cow paddock is being kind.  It is not the size of a full field and it is far from level.  There a low patches of grass over a lot of the surface and other than that it is patches of loose sand and dirt. Sometimes Bill would come home from training and his feet even inside his socks would be almost black from the dirt.  Cleaning the socks was almost impossible.  I don't know if they will ever be their original colour again. One of the schools they played against has a state of the art artificial turf field to train and play on (not full size). At times KCA hired a better field to train on but this meant time spent traveling to it so this was another factor. The kids don’t complain about their facilities, they just train on.

There is one boy missing. Five of the boys are grade 9's.
( I think they were told to look very determined but Bill didn't get that message)

The sport here is taken very seriously. The teams would train three afternoons a week after school and also play a match on another day or sometimes two days. Playing football at KCA is very character building.  You learn how to lose graciously.  Last year the upper school boys team didn't win a game and lost most by very wide margins.  This year in their first game they lost 11-0 and everyone thought this year was going to be the same and there was some little feeling of discouragement.  However within a day or so of the loss the enthusiasm was back.  Then for the rest of the season all the games were close.  There were loses of 1-0 and even a 3-2 game.  Scoring was a cause of huge excitement! In one of the last games they were able to outscore the opposition in the second half!  Then came the final two games of the season and they won them both!!!!  I was able to go to a few of their games and really enjoyed them.

Now for the food part of this installment.  We participated in our first Thanksgiving celebrations. We were invited to join with some people we know from church and school.  Three families live close together in a small village on the outskirts of Kyiv.  We arrived about 3:00 pm for a progressive meal.  It was already quite dark just because of the time of year and low cloud and fog.  Dimly through the bus window when we were almost at our destination I saw some people on a large expanse of ice with small poles looking down into the ice they were standing on. I heard later during the evening that this was a lake we were passing over and the people had cut holes in the ice and were fishing!  I had not expected to see that.  It was a cold and snowy day and walking between houses was a slow and for me a difficult exercise.  Inside however it was warm and cosy and the friendship and food were great.  We had the traditional Thanksgiving delicacies of roast turkey and pumpkin pie and hot punch.  It was all very nice. A little unfortunately I had quite a heavy cold so did not taste too much of the lovely food. 

Most of the people here we know from school and some of the children either Bill or I have taught.  I am in the far left corner and was so busy eating I didn't realize the photo was even taken. 

It was great to have a four day break from school for Thanksgiving and return refreshed for the last three weeks before the Christmas holidays.  With the preparations for exams and marking the posting of this is unfortunately very delayed.  :(

On a Friday afternoon the high school classes have a period where they do 'fun' activities.  I have been teaching six girls from grades 6-8 to crochet.  We are trying to make a small cot size blanket for use by a refugee family.  The girls are only learning and so fairly slow so I am trying to make up some squares to help so I was doing some here before the meal was ready.  Bill has been taking some students for chess in one period and supervising and sometimes joining in with ultimate frisbee in the next period. Ultimate frisbee was in the snow the last time just before the Christmas break. The kids had a great time!!

Summer holidays 2014

It is about two and a half months since we returned from our holidays. The very next day we started back at school so it has taken a while to put our holiday into the blog.  We had a most wonderful break of almost three months. 

For the first month we stayed in Kyiv and literally for me recuperated, from my school year.  I did a lot of 'nothing'.  By that I mean I read and slept and crocheted and did things at a very slow pace.  I found it delightful!  Bill also had a good rest but he also spent many hours organizing our European holiday.  It is going to be our one opportunity for an extended time in Europe so we tried to plan it as well as we could. Not having any family or friends to go to we had to organize everything ourselves and for Bill this meant many hours of work.  We spoke to lots of people here too asking for suggestions and eventually we were as organised as we thought we could be.  We were to fly to an airport just north of London and then travel about thirty kilometres to London and meet Charise who was to spend three weeks with us.  Our plan was to spend nine days with Charise in London and see as much as we could and then we would go to a seaside resort in Western Wales for a week.  Just days before we were to leave Ukraine we had heard from Bill's cousin who lives in the U.S. to say that  she and her husband were to be holidaying in the south of France and asking us if we would like to visit. We very thankfully accepted their offer and so the final week of Charise's stay was to be there.  Again not long before we left for England we became aware there was an evangelical conference in Wales in August in exactly the town we were to be staying in in July.  However there would be a two week gap between when we left France and when the conference began.  We were keen to go to the conference but where would we stay for that interval?  We contacted the conference organizers and they were able to put us in contact with a Christian group who run a coffee shop as an outreach in another small Welsh town about forty kilometres from where the conference would be.  They have student accommodation over the coffee shop (it is a university town) and it was university holiday time so the accommodation was available. So we would go from France, back to Wales, go to the conference and then back to Kyiv and start back to school.

We were able to do all the things we had planned, in a most wonderful seven weeks and four days.  I have never before spent seven weeks as tourist  and the memories we have of the places we saw and the friends we made, especially in Wales, will stay with us for the rest of our lives. 

Part of the planning of our destinations also were guided by wanting to do some parkruns while we were away and we were able to do five.  We did two in London and three in Aberystwyth in Wales.  After not doing any for almost a year it was great to join in again.  The parkrun family is very friendly and the structure is the same all over the world so we felt very much at home each week.  Now for some pictures of our fantastic holiday! Thank you, Lord.

Charise had arrived in London at midnight after a thirty hour trip from Brisbane but felt alert enough to go to church at 11.00 am. We went to Spurgeon's Tabernacle and really enjoyed the very traditional service. We estimate the church could hold about 1500 and it was full. The preaching of the word of God was really good. 

This is a place called Bunhill Fields. It is in central London.  Many non-conformists are buried here such as Isaac Watts, William Blake and Daniel Defoe. Charise and I are standing in front of the tomb of John Bunyan.  You can see Pilgrim with his burden on the side of the monument.  Now we wish we had taken the photo from the other side.

We spent a day at Hampton Court. To walk where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey and so many others walked was amazing.  Having taught history for many years it was fascinating to be in the place where so much history took place. The tapestries were so amazing.  I had to keep reminding myself that they weren't done by machine. 

This is mid-summer in a seaside resort in central Wales. We stayed in Aberystwth for about a week. The beaches there were all pebble beaches, so very different for Australians. One of the things that tourists can do there is go on the coastal walking path.  There is a path that actually goes almost 100 km along the Welsh coast, but we only walked a very small portion of it. The headland you can see in the background is part of the walk.  We did climb it.  In the photo it looks rather innocuous but in real life it felt almost vertical and there was no real path.  Charise and I managed to go up but knew we could not go down so after a five km  hike along the cliff top we walked back by the road, further but easier.

Such beautiful, beautiful countryside, well worth the climb up the headland.  There is nothing between Aberystwyth and Ireland except 50 miles of Irish Sea and we were over 400 feet up, so it was very windy.  Wind is something you become very familiar with in Aberystwyth. 

Looking back to Aber as it is usually called there. Aber is Welsh for 'at the mouth of', so along the coast there are lots of Aber towns. Abergiveny, Aberaeron etc.

Charise enjoying Wales!  This is another headland near Aberystwyth, but on this one there is a monument to Wellington.  There is simply a high tower there and no real indication of what it is there for unless you read the tourist information in you accommodation. This was a much easier climb than the previous one because the path wound around the headland instead of going straight up the side.

It is not easy to find a photo that proves that Bill was there too enjoying everything.

On our way with Bill's cousin, Larisa, and her husband, John, for our first sight of the Mediterranean. It was about 29 degrees and the warmest weather we had had in almost a year.  We had one day in London when it was 27.7 and the newspapers were talking of the 'extreme heat'.

We had a week (Charise a little less) in the south of France and the weather was like this most of the time.

The blue Mediterranean looking east toward Italy.  We did travel one day to Italy and also went through Monaco.  You are only in Monaco for a few minutes on the train but almost the whole time you are in a tunnel so you don't see much of the country at all. It was a steep climb to the lookout but the view was well worth it.

For about ten days after Charise had returned home Bill and I returned to Wales and  stayed in a small Welsh town called Lampeter. It is a university town and we were staying directly across the road from the University. The grounds and building you can see are part of the Uni.  It is the third oldest university in the UK.  Only Oxford and Cambridge are older.  Wales is a great place for history.  In the grounds of the Uni are the remains of a mote and bailey castle (a type of fortification).  I remember teaching the children  about these castles and to see the remains of one was very special.  This one was built by order of William the Conqueror in the 1070s.  It was only successful for a few years and then the Welsh men stormed the castle and were victorious.  My grandmother's family was from Wales so it was great to stay there and tour round at least some of Wales and hear Welsh being spoken.    

 We stayed above a coffee shop run by a local church.  The brown building behind me is the coffee shop .  Bill especially, helped out while we were there washing and drying many, many dishes.The coffee shop is run as an outreach and the Christians there are praying and serving with gentleness the community around them.

Before church one Sunday we were there.  The service is in a local hall.  The morning service is in the English but the evening service is in Welsh with translation available.  It is a small congregation but more arrived after this was taken. The singing was so good! Good sermons too!

Wales is very wet as you can see by all the moss growing everywhere. I often felt we were on the set of 'The Lord of the Rings' when we went on walks around Lampeter.

We were taken for a drive to the northern part of Wales.  This is a huge reservoir. The water from here is not actually used in Wales but is piped to Birmingham. I had not realized there were so many sheep in Wales until we went on this drive. The land is mostly too infertile for cropping and it is also very hilly so raising sheep is the main farming activity in Wales.   

Some of the very good friends we made in Wales.  Some of them work in the cafe on a part-time basis.  The view from this hill top church cemetery was spectacular.  Fifty miles to our left behind us is Ireland.

At home in Australia Bill and I had started doing parkruns.  These are 5 km timed runs on Saturday mornings.  These began ten years ago in England and now exist in many parts of the world.  There are no official ones in Ukraine.  Bill and I have done some unofficial ones in the park across the road from our unit.  So when we decided to holiday in the UK we particularly looked to see if there were any parkruns near where we were staying or if we could find accommodation near a parkrun site. We were able to and in  the seven weeks we were away we were able to do five parkruns.  Here I am going in on my last gasp in our last run of the holidays in Aberystwth in Wales.  I had about fifty metres to go and I knew there was someone close behind me.

Spring break in March

School holidays are done differently in the US system.  There is a very long break in the summer, three months.  Because of this there are not so many holidays during the rest of the school year. Other than Christmas when we had a little over two weeks the only other longer break was at the beginning of spring, hence referred to as - Spring Break.  We had a week's holiday.  It was so nice. Even in the Christmas holidays we had done some school preparation at times because we were at home; but in the spring we went away so it was the first time since August that we had seven consecutive days without any school work at all.

You can see foothills of the Carpathian mountains  in the background.  On the lake are two wild swans.  We walked past here most days and it was a lovely sight.

We spoke to a local resident one day as we were passing here and he remarked that it was good to see not one but two swans, that it wasn't good if there was only one.

We decided to go to the Carpathian Mountains region in the very west of Ukraine.  We went by train. There is a fast train service to the general area but it arrives in L'viv about 11.00 pm so we decided to go by the overnight train that arrives where we were staying at about 9.00 am, a much more civilized time for booking into your accommodation. We stayed just outside the town of Truskavets.  It is just at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and from the town you could see the mountains in the distance very beautiful.  In the winter people stay in Truskavets and travel to the snow fields.  Truskavets is a tourist town.  There is no industry there so the air is clean and fresh. In the seasons other than winter the main reason people travel there other than for the scenery and the quiet is for the waters.  There are many high rise apartment blocks which are spa resorts.  We also saw one quite large building where you could go and drink various waters.  We saw people with what looked like small tea pots.  In a large circular room there were taps and each had a different water.  People would fill up their teapot like containers and then drink the water via the spout. There were many of the containers for sale around the town and many were very elaborately painted with different scenes.  We watched but didn't participate.

Walking into Truskavets.  It took us about an hour each way.  Even though it was the beginning of spring it was still quite cold even when  walking fairly briskly.

We had walked a  hundred metres or so off the road into the forest. As you can see many of the trees still didn't have leaves.

The holiday resort we stayed at was about an hour’s walk outside the town and in the forest.  We could have caught a mini bus part of the way but whenever we went into the town we walked.  It was really nice walking through the forest.  The road we walked along for about half of the way was not used much so the walk was very pleasant. The forests here are quite different to the bush we are used to at home. The trees have more horizontal branches and many leaves so it is quite shady in the forest and the patchy shadows make beautiful patterns on the ground.  There is also very little undergrowth .  It almost looks as if someone mows it. Never having heard a woodpecker we didn't know the sound to listen for, but on one of our first days there we heard one in a park, in town and then knowing what to listen for we heard many of them on our walks.  It was special to hear them.  The leaves of the trees are so dense that you usually cannot see the birds you can hear. In the summer when we first arrived I really noticed the lack of bird sounds but in the spring you hear a lot and it is lovely.  In the parks in town we also saw many squirrels that are often  prepared to take nuts from people's hands. They are a different type of squirrel to this part of Ukraine.  The ones in the east were a chocolate brown with very feathery ears and tails. 

One of the cabins where we were staying. Each one had about a dozen rooms.

In Truskavets itself.  These are small booths aimed at tourists.  They are permanent structures but there were many small booths that were not permanent and we saw people packing up quite a bit of merchandise at the end of each day and then of course they had to set it all up again the next day.

We ate here almost every day. The food was Ukrainian and so cheap.

In Ukrainian the sign on this fire brigade station says:
to prevent, to save, to help.

This young lady slowed her horse down so it would be in the photo.  There were horse drawn carriages you could tour the town in . This was a government office of some kind but very typical of the older buildings in the town.

The last thing for this time is about our train journeys to and from Truskavets.  The fast train that I mentioned earlier takes about five hours to reach L'viv and then we would have had to travel south.  We decided to take the overnight train which went directly to our destination. Being new to Ukraine we didn't know what the train would be like. We had asked some people who had used the train and they just sort of said that we would find it an experience.  We did.  The train leaves Kyiv about 8.30 pm and we arrived about 9.00 am the next morning. We found out that we had booked on the least elaborate service.  The carriage was like a large open dormitory with double bunks on either side of a narrow aisle. Most bunks were across the width of the carriage but some ran the length of the carriage.  Ours were the length of the carriage ones. Not long after the train moved out Bill (tongue very much in cheek) asked when I was changing into my pyjamas.  Seeing as we were in a completely open carriage I was not changing.  However we soon found out that in Ukraine even if you are in an open dormitory carriage you do change into pyjamas.  There was a toilet at the end of the carriage but very small and everyone just changed where they were as modestly as they thought necessary.  Some people hung up blankets for family members, but most people just changed. Nobody seemed to even notice.  I do not know how men manage to sleep in the beds but Bill said he slept reasonably well.  The beds are very small.  The bed was about four centimetres wider than my shoulders and my feet touched the division to the next bed when I lay flat. People whose bunk ran the width of the train simply put their feet out into the aisle.  This was a hazard to avoid if you walked down the aisle after the lights went out (not of course that it was ever pitch dark).  I tend to spread out when I sleep but the bed was so narrow it was not possible so I didn't have the best sleep on the way there.  On the way back it was a little better. Most people was very thoughtful and considerate and kept their talking to a minimum.  People started going to bed about 9.30 pm and everyone quietened down.  The train of course stopped at many stations during the night and people got off and on.  We were on holidays so we could catch up on lost sleep and it was a most interesting experience especially when you look back on it after it is over.

Asked a passer-by in Truskavets to take a photo of both of us :)

A magnificent monastery complex

We had just come out of the catacombs (hence the head scarf). The size of the of the church in the                              background helps to give some idea of how vast the whole site is. 

We have now been in Ukraine for ten months and we have finally made a trip to one of the most prominent sites in Kyiv - the Kyiv-Pechersk monastery complex.  This is a huge area on the highest point in Kyiv and contains many, many buildings.  

This helps to see how it is the highest point of the city. All the buildings with green roofs in the foreground and middle distance are part of the complex. We were standing very near the church you can see in the distance with the scaffolding, in the previous picture.  In the far distance on the right of the photo you can see the other side of the river with the row upon row of residential high rises.

The complex, however, has been built in a very haphazard fashion and there doesn't seem to be any order as to where various buildings are located. It is a very ancient site and some parts of buildings date back to the 11th century.  There are many churches on the site and an Orthodox seminary which is under the authority of the Moscow Orthodox Church. It is a place where many people visit and tours of small groups are conducted. 

The lady with the pink scarf was the guide.  She always put the scarf over her head in the churches but it was only in the catacomb section that it was mandatory for the women. The explanations were not in English. You could have one in English but it was a lot more expensive and Bill could tell me about what he heard without the cost.  Seeing as I was not listening to her so much we have quite a few photos of me gazing upwards at the churches.

We went on a tour and it took an hour, but we saw just a small fraction of the area. There were many university-aged art students doing sketches and paintings of the buildings.

The whole area is very well maintained and as you can see the churches are magnificent structures.

The buildings are not all churches by any means. There are libraries and other things and one building (not one of these) was once a hospital.

 

There were tourist things for sale (see on the right) but it was very low key and did not intrude on the experience.

The churches are amazing with just about every speck of the interior either painted with scenes from the Bible or saints of the church or carved.

At the conclusion of the tour we were able to walk through a catacomb area. Priests in the distant past would live in small cells in this area. Some would live there for a number years, some lived all the remainder of their life. You couldn't see into the cells but the doors into them were unbelievably small.  The area was completely dark.  We were allowed to take a taper candle in with us for light and there were occasionally some feeble electric lights but I found it difficult to see my way.  There were passages and stairs. The passages were fairly low and very narrow.  The tourist information said it is a difficult place for taller than usual people and for people who are claustrophobic.  I am not especially keen on dark narrow places but I didn't find it difficult at all to cope with. My problem was that it was so dim and the path was not always very even so I was not always sure of my footing. The area where we could walk was not huge but there is another area as well which we did not see, maybe it is bigger.  There were a number of glass coffins where there were bodies from many centuries ago. The information says that the monks built the catacombs themselves but it didn't say how. Women cannot go into this area unless wearing a skirt and having their hair covered. I had come prepared. Even though it is a tourist site it is still a working Orthodox community and seminary so we saw quite a few young seminary student in ground length black robes moving around.

There was building work going on in one area. During World War 2 damage was done to the area. Many years ago not long after we married Bill's dad had read for me from a book called 'Babi Yar' (grandma’s ravine).  It recounts what happened in Ukraine and Kyiv in particular during the German occupation from Sep 1941- Nov 1943. At the present I am re-reading the book. In one part the author recounts what happened to the Kyiv-Pechersk complex.  He says there is controversy as to who caused it but many parts of the site had mines laid in it some months after the initial occupation of the city. These mine were then suddenly detonated. Official Soviet history blames German troops saying the German commanders were trying to destroy Kyiv and punish the local people. Others blame the Soviet troops for setting off the mines in order to cause as much damage to the occupying German army as they could.   No one knows for certain which story is accurate.  Anyway, one of the largest churches on the site was one of the buildings that was mined.  Only about an eighth of the large building was left standing.

This is the church that is being rebuilt.  As you can see it is almost complete after fourteen years of work.  On the other side there is still scaffolding in places. We did go into a small section but I don't know how much of the interior is still to be completed. The cupola on the left partially obscured be the tree is one that was damaged in the explosions and has not been replaced.

In the Soviet era in Ukraine after the end of the war many of the buildings in this area were turned into museums.  However, since Ukraine gained independence again late in 1991 work has begun to rebuild this important church.  Most of it is now complete.  One of the cupolas is obviously damaged. It has deliberately been left as it was when the building was mined as a reminder of the event. The churches are beautiful and magnificent. We hope and pray that many here will come to know the unsurpassed beauty and greatness of the Creator of all in the face of Christ.

Sights to see in Kyiv

This probably should have been one of our first posts but is good to finally come around to it.  Kyiv is a very old city but it has had a turbulent history so while you do see old buildings, there are not hosts of them.  The main thing we noticed when we arrived at first, even just driving into the city from the airport, were the Soviet era apartment blocks that are everywhere.  We live in a part of the city known as the 'right bank' which is the old part of the city and there are many of these blocks of apartments but on the left bank which we have not seen so much of, there are many many more of them. The river that flows through Kyiv is the Dnipro. The left bank has only really been built since the Second World War.

This picture was taken from inside a moving marshrutka. The buildings do actually stand up straight.                    The areas on the left bank have row after row of these buildings. 

 One of the first places we visited after our arrival was the main street of the city.  It is closed to traffic on a Sunday and many people go there and walk and shop. The first thing I noticed was how wide the street is. The footpaths are very wide too.  It is a very touristy place on a Sunday. There are many young women dressed like Scarlet O'Hara from 'Gone With the Wind' who walk up and down the street selling confectionery set out on small trays.  Many people have their photograph taken with them.  We went to the large square at the end of the street and there were many people there, especially young men, trying to earn money from tourists.  There were people dressed in costumes and immediately they saw anyone taking photos they would come and offer to take a photo of the group for them and have themselves in the photos as well and then ask for money because they had done that.  They could be very persistent.  There were also men with eagles and doves.  They endeavour to put the bird on your arm and take a photo and then you must pay.  You have to dodge quickly if you don't want to have it happen.  Anywhere where tourists gather this will happen. We were there in August and the square was very nice and peaceful.

This photo (which we did not take) shows the beautiful blue skies you see here. We would love to see more of them. You can also see how wide the main street is.  Not all roads are like that.  We do have an eight lane road in front of our apartment building though.  We  front on to one of the main streets of the city. 

Maidan on a quiet afternoon last summer before it became world news.

The persistent costumed young men. We had bought a frying pan earlier in the day and I carried it the rest of the day.  It features in a number of our photos, even here. They instruct you how to stand for the photo.

The square was built in 1991 just after Ukraine left the Soviet Union.  There is a very tall plinth with a young woman on the top with arms raised.  She represents independence.  The square is called Independence Square.  The next time we went there was on the 25th of December.  By this time the square had been occupied for about a month by protesters, so looked very different.  We have not been back since the protests there but I am sure it would look different again.  You will perhaps have heard of the word Maidan in the news.  Maidan is the word for 'square' and this is where most of the deaths occurred in February

Maidan in February looking very different from just six months earlier.

 Not too far from Maidan (Ukrainian doesn't often use definite or indefinite articles) are the churches of St. Michael and St. Sophia.  They are very grand.  Both of these places were involved in the protests as well.  At one point early in the protests, police moved in during the early hours of the morning to clear the protesters from Independence Square (Maidan).  A young seminary student at St Michael's received a text that this was occurring.  He went and asked permission from his superior for him to ring the church bells to warn the sleeping protesters.  He was given permission and for the next few hours he (later others came to relieve him) rang the bells. The last time these bells were rung as a warning was in 1240 to warn the people of Kyiv that the Mongols were attacking the city!  The bells were heard in Maidan and the protesters were able to repel the police raids. The special thing is that the bells normally cannot be heard in Maidan.

St Sophia's before it became a temporary emergency hospital.

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Again we did not take this photo but we wanted to show you the priests and demonstrators standing unarmed between the two groups.  They have their backs to the police and security forces. it is worth commenting that many of the casualties in the fighting were from expert sniper gunmen using high-powered weapons from long range, so these men were in great danger.

St Sophia church is only a few hundred metres away from St Michael's.  When the protests were at their height in the middle of February, St Sophia was turned into an emergency hospital and the injured protesters were taken there for emergency surgery by volunteer doctors or made their own way there and took refuge from the Special Forces and police who were searching for them. Priests and other clergy were much involved in the protests in attempts to keep them peaceful and to give aid to the wounded.  Often clergy stood unarmed between the protesters and police to try to stop police and special forces from attacking unarmed protesters. One couple we have met here at church lived in an apartment very close to Maidan.  They could see and hear much of what was going on in those turbulent days.  They told us of something that they said was not reported in Western media. During the days of the protests the Ukrainian Hymn (National Anthem ) was sung about once every hour. However that was not the only thing the crowds did.  Each hour the crowds also repeated the Lord's Prayer.

Demonstrators being led in prayer on Maidan.

The final sight for this time is the Taras Shevchenko University.  It really stands out.  It is not far from the city centre.  It is named for Ukraine's most well known and loved poet and writer of the nineteenth century.

You can see why we say you cannot miss the University.  In real life the colour is even brighter.

The buildings on  the left of the picture are parts of  one the most famous churches in Kyiv.  We had wanted to look at it and at catacombs beneath it but Charise and I weren't wearing skirts so we couldn't go in.  On the right is a war memorial.  Next to it but not in this photo is a below ground memorial to the estimated more than six million Ukrainian people who died in a man made famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s. The Soviet leaders tried to break the Ukrainian people by simply taking the food they had grown out of the country and leaving the population to starve.

This is the Dnipro River.  It is a very popular place not far from the city centre.  Not quite the Gold or Sunshine Coasts but nice not far from the city.