Ukraine is celebrating Victory Day here so it is a govt holiday. That means another day here for us. (The holiday party started last night in our apartment building with loud music that kept us awake for awhile) We did visit Independence Square yesterday so saw familiar sites on TV this morning as they televised the parade from there. It would have been interesting to see but since it is raining I am glad we didn't go down there.
Please pray for sunshine quickly (since it is 4:30pm here) We washed socks, etc in the tub this morning and hung everything out to dry on our enclosed sun porch. We hope it drys before we depart at 5 am for the orphanage. We do have a wash machine (I think) in our apartment but it is very different looking and the instructions are not in English.
We need to try to find some more supplies before we head to the country and it has been raining on and off today. We met the other couple who are adopting and had pizza with them. Yes, pizza again. We have had four meals: pizza, pizza, McDonalds, and pizza. McDonalds does not have an English menu and has different items so wasn't as easy as you think it would be. So we are off to the market to find some more labels that look familiar. We did find yogurt (Dannon looking label) and asked a Ukranian born American at Uno Pizza what kind of milk brand to buy. We like that pizza place because we find Americans there who can help us! Yesterday at the market, I told Amber to remember the word for strawberry, Morgan the word for cherry and I had yogurt (because it is the same). That way we could order quicker and not hold up the line.
We leave at 5 am tomorrow packed into a small car for our 4 hour trip to Andriyevo. Try to find it on the internet! It is about 100 miles north of Odessa. Please pray for safe travel since we hear that no one drives slow. We also get a new facilitator (Seroge) and we still don't know where we are staying once there. We probably will not have internet so any posts will be via phone call to my sister Lynette again. That was the first update in case you didn't know who it was.
These are pictures of the old city gate. There was a wall that completely surrounded the city long ago - I think the 10th century. The gate is all that is left and now houses a museum I guess. These are pictures of both sides and you can see how thick the wall must have been. This was across from Pizza Uno but we never knew what it was until the last day here.
