Day 2

Today was mostly a sleep late and explore day. We didn't have money on our phones so we had a few issues in the morning, mostly with our boys calling us and wanting us to call back but we couldn't. We met the wife of a friend of ours early in the day- Native to Kiev she gave us the directions to add money to our phone and walked us to a Kiosk. She also gave us directions to the mall and street vendors.

We went to the mall for lunch and window shopping. Half the family settled for McDonald's the rest of us tried the pizza. One of the slices had mayo on it for the sauce, the ones with marinara you had to use a microscope to find it.

We located the street vendors after we left the mall. Very much like going to Mexico or swap meet, most of the vendors sold the same stuff with minor variance. It was fun. Richard and the boys all bought fur hats, they opted for the sheepskin ones which were slightly more money but more comfortable. We were told the scratchy ones were soldiers hats while the sheepskin was only for officers.

Our boys have not stopped calling us since we arrived, for confidentiality reasons we can not use the boys names on the blog- I will instead for the purpose of this blog I will use their English names in age order- Joseph, Alex and Kevin. Alex called the most today- I think at least once between each of his school classes. Kevin also called and while Joseph didn't call we still spoke with him twice.

While walking around the street vendors I acutely missed Alex, I couldn't help but think how much more fun it would have been with him. When we purchase the phone cards we also bought some for the boys phones too. We had the woman at the kiosk speak with Alex so that he could write down the number so he could call. He also spent time today texting us but in Ukrainian.

We walked up to the top of one of the large churches for a wonderful view of the city and then went to a Irish Pub for dinner. The food was mostly American and we received a very strange look from the waitress when we asked if the cheese burger had meat on it. We have not encountered much of what we would call "good" service, we don't receive bad service just not what we would think of as attentive.

Tomorrow we meet with a woman and her new son as she travels back to Kiev to head home this week.