Exploring Kiev

You'll never guess what we did today... We went to a playground!  Ha, I bet you did guess.

Check out that old fashioned see saw, and they have classic merry-go-rounds too, the kids love them.

The playgrounds here are Katya's dream come true, and in Paris too actually, because instead of grass the base is sand.  So where I see a dirty sandy playground area she sees one big sandbox.  You'll hardly ever catch her actually playing on the playground equipment because all she wants to do is mess with the sand.  If you know Katya at all this will come as no surprise to you.  I'm glad she is having fun but you can be sure that I've gone through many bottles of hand sanitizer (on all the kids, and none more than when we were riding the subways).

Actually, it was a great day of exploring many of the famous sights in Kiev, with two playground stops built in.  It was not easy to convince Katya that she had to say no when strangers asked her if she wanted to pet their bird, apparently this is all the rage here, tame pigeons that you can pet - for a fee!  They are everywhere!  But eventually the novelty wore off and now she can walk right on by and tell the person in perfect English (that they can't understand) that her mean mom and dad won't let her pet their bird.  We did let her ride one of the ponies in the park.  The whole time she was all smiles, rambling on to the guy leading the pony about her horse Lily, I can't imagine what he must have been thinking but I'm certain he could not understand a word she said.  

No one here speaks English.  Though my Russian is very minimal I am so glad I learned what I did!  And Justin knows the Cyrillic alphabet well so between the two of us we can read and sometimes interpret and speak, not bad.  The only place that has really stumped us is the post office, go figure.  So sorry, no postcards. We were actually trying to mail our Paris postcards that we kept forgetting to mail while we were in France, I guess they weren't meant to make it home before us. 

Here are some pictures from the day... I focused on pics of the kids, Justin got the buildings with his camera, so if you're looking for the beautiful sights right now you only get the four loud little American ones with a preview of the historic architectural ones in the background (and more to come later).

Note that I did not pose this, they are just goofy.  I love moments like this and how lucky that I always have a camera at the ready on this trip, the moment would have passed before I ever even thought to get out my camera if we were at home.

What do you think they are looking at? I have no idea.  Maybe the beautiful gold domes on top of this monestary, I think there are 7 (you can kind of see them a few pictures above).  At one point Jax was trying to figure out how much they would be worth.  Interestingly just minutes later we found these brass replicas that you can buy for the top of your own house: 

Only 6000 hyrivna.  How do you think one would look on top of our house?  Don't go calling the HOA just yet, sadly we can't fit one in our suitcase.  The whole idea gave us some good laughs!

This last picture is of us buying our tokens for the funicular, only 18 cents each.  It is an awesome historic tram that takes you almost straight up from the Dniper River to the city center.  It is really cool but my explanation would not do it justice, try Wikipedia :).  Where you get off the fenicular at the top is an ice cream stand, many of them in fact.  This was a welcome treat since we did only take the ride up, we walked all the way down, about a mile.  Cullen of course slept most of the way which means Justin and I carried him -- no need for a gym on this trip!  But his eyes shot open at the mention of ice cream, amazing how that happens.  It was a sweet ending to a great day.