We slept for 11 hours! Amazing. Could have slept another 5, but the phone rang and it was Gregory, our agent here in Ukraine. He said that we were on our own until tomorrrow when we would meet Svieta (short for Svitlana) our tranlsator. We spent the day on a self guided orientation of downtown Kiev. Found a buffet restaurant with traditional Ukrainian foods and had lunch, then headed to Kreschatyk Street, a long, modern boulevard full of shops hotels, banks, etc. Took a bunch of pictures posted here. It’s cold and a little moist, but we are prepared for the weather. The sky is gray and the people don’t smile much. A vestige of the Soviet era Greg says. (There are a lot of vestiges of that era. Many of the buildings, as you can see from the pictures, are monumental and gray and foreboding looking.) As we’ve learned, the people have suffered a lot here over the last century. Famine, the hardships under Stalin, the destruction of WWII, a rough economy. But our impression overall is that Kiev is a modern city that seems to work. Lots of hustle and bustle everywhere.
We had good coffee, checked an alternative hotel in case the internet connection might be working better than ours (it wasn’t), and walked back to the hotel after 4 or 5 hours. Dinner that night in the hotel.