Kiev so far

Kiev has been interesting. To start with, I understand more Russian than I thought I did. Even sitting here in the internet cafe, I can understand some of what is being said behind me at the counter. It's not a lot, but I'm picking up more all the time.

We were met at the Borispol airport by our posse. The posse is made up of Tatiana our facilitator who knows English about like I know Russian, Alexi (Tatiana's son in law), our driver who doesn't know a word of English and Sasha (Tatiana's son), a translator who speaks very good English. We were very late due to our plane being delayed and an hour not finding half of our luggage.

The apartment they took us to startled us because the buildings look like Cabrini Green in Chicago. AKA - the slums, but in reality the apartment itself is very nice and we feel very safe there.

Sasha took us down to the market across the street, which is a series of small buildings selling a variety of goods. We picked up some bread, cheese and sausage for dinner and some water too. We've been back to the market area a few times since - that's where we are now in the internet cafe.

I've had an interesting time making my needs known to people in my poor Russian. Sometimes I end up resorting to the point and grunt method, but I know enough to ask for most things. I just now went up and asked for another hour on the computers and had a heck of a time. I couldn't recall the word for hour and ended up pointing at my watch after saying something like, "two computer plus". It takes time, but I usually get my point across.

Our time at the NAC (National Adoption Center) did not go as well as hoped yesterday, but it is pretty much par for the course when dealing with the NAC from what we know. Sasha was not available, so Luba joined us as a translator. She isn't related to Tatiana, but is much like a daughter to her. Her English isn't quite as good as Sasha's, but good enough.

The office is at the top of six flights of stairs, which was quite the workout. We looked through profiles of children for over two hours with a lady named, Oxana. All of the children had some type of health issues and we finally left at Tatiana's suggestion. She has heard that more children will be added to the roster on the 15th. We wrote up a request for an appointment before leaving.

We had dinner with the posse at a nice cafeteria serving Ukrainian food after the appointment. I had some borsch and vyriniky (kind of like perogies) and a big bottle of beer. Ukrainian beer is pretty good, but not quite as good as the English beer so far.

After dinner we took a long walk with Luba around some of the squares downtown in Kiev. She showed us the sights and it was very interesting.

We rested all day Sunday and aside from shopping and internet are taking today easy too. Tomorrow we will do some more sightseeing with Luba, which should be interesting. We are kind of disappointed with our meeting at the NAC. We had hoped that they would show us a healthy child right from the start, but waiting another week is not so bad in the big scheme of things.