We all made it safely from Ukraine, so this make the first blog post in Ukraine. Now, we actually arrived a week ago but I didn't have internet access! As I now have internet in my appartment, I can bring you up-to-date on all I've been doing. (Actually, the internet is a lot faster than I expected.)
On the way over we had a long layover in London, so we made it an adventure. It was truly one of the craziest days in my life so far! Because we had such a long layover, we had to check our bags again which required storing them over night. We then took to the streets and made it a day of exploring that great city. As far as I can tell, London has perfected public transportation! The Tube(the name of the London subway system) has a stop directly beneath the airport for easy access to travelers. There is also a whole set up to buy tickets for it in the airport lobby. Since we knew we needed to depend on London's public transportation options, we decided to ask one of the ladies at the desk what our best option was for touring the city for the day. She kindly pointed us to a day pass that enabled us to ride the Tube as well as all the buses(including the double-decked red buses!) I truly felt like I had reached London, and therefore Europe, when she called me "my love" in the same way "hun" is used down south in the US. And the day just kept getting better! Our first stop off the Tube landed us right under Big Ben and across the river from the Eye of London. Recently, I've been watching a lot of Dr. Who(a British Science fiction show) so I had to do a double check for an alien spaceship in the Thames River.
Ended up spending most of the day on our feet. We saw some government buildings and Westminster Abby(just the outside, there was a huge line to go inside and it wasn't opening for some time.) We had fish and chips for lunch in a crowded and tiny restaurant. We got to see the horse guards and walk across their parade grounds. We walked through the St. James Park along the Diana Memorial Walk where my camera decided that it had seen enough of London! To the right you can see the last photo it snapped before shutting off on me...
At the other end of the park we gazed in at the Buckingham Palace. Then, we turned back into the park where the grass was green and very inviting. There was quite a large space of unoccupied land under some shade trees so we made like the local people and rested there for some time. I believe that everyone else managed to get some rest, but I decided to stay awake. Since I had my flute with me, I played it a little bit and discovered the notes to "London Bridge." After a time, Jordan woke up and decided that we couldn't spend our day sleeping in the park. During one of our explorations of the Tubes, we found some maps to help guide us. At this point, I found a street that shares my surname and since we were nearby we began searching it out so
that I could get a photo on it. After that, we decided that we should also hit King's Cross so that Cody could get a picture there since he shares a name with it. At King's Cross we looked for the legendary "Platform 9 and 3/4" but we could not find the sign. We returned to the streets because we wanted to ride one of the red buses. We found a bus stop and we sat and waited at it for quite some time. Finally, one of those famous buses appeared but it was carrying a wedding party that took some time to exit. Apparently, it was a wedding bus. We watched the sight for a little while and then decided to try another stop. We walked down the street and crossed at some point and voted to board the first double decker bus we could reach no matter where it was headed. By our logic we couldn't get lost because we had bus and Tube maps to back us up. After all, we believed we had a great understanding of how public transportation systems work. And even if we got lost we know that there's always a way to backtrack. Luckily we didn't get lost(no thanks to me who fell asleep during the ride). We got pretty hungry riding that bus, so we decided to get off at the next stop that looked like a good candidate for food. We found a little cafe and we ordered some food and somehow annoyed the man working there. It was an interesting experience all on it's own. Everything was simple and pretty much just what the menu called it. For instance, Potato and
Leak soup tasted like potatoes and leaks pureed together and made into soup. As it got later, we returned to the airport where we pulled our luggage from storage and then found a quite corner to spend the night. We decided to spend the night in the airport for several reasons. The first of these was that the place we stored our bags didn't open soon enough for us to get to our flight.
Also, it was free. That night turned out to be one of the longest in my life. The seats in Heathrow airport have armrest, so we couldn't sleep on them. So we slept atop our bags the best we could. A few other people our age also found themselves in similar predicaments and they each settled near enough to us to join in our security and far enough not to be part of us. In case you were wondering, Heathrow polishes the floors during the night.
When morning finally came we had to wait around for security to open. But once it did, we passed smoothly through. Actually, it turns out that we were each give an extra pound due to the conversions into kg and security was much easier to pass through than in the states. From London we flew into Kiev where we met up with Mike McDougle. He helped us pass through to the next flight. That flight in itself was an experience. We had to take a bus from the terminal to the plane. Once we got to the plane, it was quite a little thing and we couldn't take our larger carry-on items with us. Luckily, I was prepared for such a thing and I had my small backpack ready. Turns out the plane was not only small, but sort of old and it vibrated a lot! I was half tempted to thing it was going to shake apart. This was our first experience with the confusion of not knowing the language. The flight attendant made her announcements in Ukrainian and then in English, but her English was more of a memorized string of sounds. Luckily we didn't find ourselves in an emergency situation, so there was no need to worry about not hearing her instructions!
When we finally got to the Kharkov airport at the conclusion of our long journey, we were met at the gate by more than half of the mission team! We all went to the Hindman's apartment together where met up with the rest of the team. We all talked for a while so that us jet-lagged aimers wouldn't fall asleep too early and then we went to "the girl's apartment" where I live with Jordan and EJ. They had pulled the couch beds out for us, showed us where some stuff was around the apartment and then left us to rest from our journey. We slept really good that first night.
That's all I'm going to write for this post. This should have been published a couple weeks ago, but I was suffering from jetlag and hit the "save now" instead of "publish" buttons. I was going to write about language lessons or orientation week, but then I decided it was better to just edit this post first. Also, because of the publishing errors with this post, it's not being released in the usual manner with an announcement of face book. So if you're reading this, congratulations! You either subscribe to my blog or are inquisitive enough to find this post! I think both of those are great!
Godspeed!
