Life in Kiev

Settling in in Kiev (Kyiv, Київ) quite nicely now.  Check out my new business card (Lisa Street, sic) and my rather large apartment.  Taking me back to my student days on Erb Street, Waterloo, the apartment building has centralised heating which is pumped up to the max - even when it was -25C outside, I still had a window open to combat the heating!!

I have managed - with the help of Oleh, a lovely local who seems to enjoy helping foreigners even more than I do! - to fill up the refrigerator, connect the DVD player (first film was Валл-і - that's Wall-E to you!), and master the marshrutka (taxi-bus).  Well, the latter is Ok as long as I have the correct change and someone else requests the bus stop where I want to get off  ;-)

On Sunday, Oleh took me to the small but beautiful church where his brother was christened (and we inadvertently crashed someone else's christening oops).  Then we went to the Lavra (Caves Monastery), a massive and stunning site full of churches (both underground & above ground) and the main religious site of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - at least, the branch of this which is overseen by the Moscow Patriarch.  If I understand correctly, there is a relatively new Kiev Patriarch who heads a "fully Ukrainian" branch of the Orthodox church. It was so interesting to see these sights with a local person - I'm not sure I have such a high level of respect for any of my local sights! - but also he exposed lots of issues I wouldn't have thought of, such as whether it is fair to charge an admission fee to people who have simply come to the Lavra to pray...

Dormition Cathedral at the Lavra

Our final tourist stop of the day was a brisk walk around the park which surrounds the Museum of the Great Patriotic War (WWII).  It's all a bit buried in snow right now but even so, I could spot several tanks, a plane and even a train on display.  There is also a strange above-ground concrete "tunnel" with many larger than life reliefs of war scenes.  On the other side of this tunnel you come to the GIANT statue of Rodina Mat (spot me, in the white coat, looking microscopic).  This is, not surprisingly, a Soviet legacy intended to represent the "nation's mother".  Oleh was less than impressed  ;-)

We ended our day with a traditional Ukrainian meal of borshch (my kind of soup, made seemingly randomly with meat, beans, vegetables & some beets for colour!) accompanied by pampushkamy (garlic buns) and some deruny (potato pancakes with sour cream - not as good as mine, I'm afraid  ;-) ).  Add some strolling traditional musicians - and no, this wasn't really a tourist restaurant - and we were all set.  Plus I finally restored my normal body temperature!  Which meant that I was unwilling to get out of the warm car to see the "floating church" next to the Dnipro river on the way home - frankly, it was very pleasant to do some sightseeing from the car at that point  ;-)  My favourite was the brightly lit rainbow monument "The Friendship of the People".

Well, now back to work - I have already done 3 presentations on Saturday about studying in the UK, and the next will either be school presentations about life overseas, or about studying in Canada.  Better study up on the latter myself - my school days were long ago!

I'll leave you with some funny "international errors" - my version of bloopers!

• Spent ages studying the shampoo & conditioner options on my first shopping foray.  Proudly chose a Timotei product, only to find when I went to wash my hair that it seemed very unlike shampoo. Some laborious translation has revealed the word "intensive" - methinks I have bought some fabulous conditioner?  TOP TIP - shampoo = жампунь
• Very frustrating evening with my borrowed Russian-language laptop, trying to convince it to connect to the modem at my apartment.  Created a random new connection (when it doubt, just choose the first option in each dialogue box!) and even attempted to get some remote help from Chris, but all to no avail.  Just as I was preparing to haunt the local WiFi hotspot for the next month, Oleh dropped by and took a look.  Hmm, would it help if the modem was plugged in...?  And how many times have I told people to check this first, when they report IT problems?!

More news soon as I have visitors this weekend, tour guide hat is ready to go!