We started our day with some family worship, prayer, and Bible reading, missing being with our church family but not awake enough to make it to any services here in Kiev. Natasha was gracious enough to spend the whole day with us, showing us some of the beautiful city of Kiev. The architecture was striking, from the beautiful and ornate, centuries-old churches with their gold, onion-shaped domes, to the old, historic buildings with amazing architectural detail. We walked down to see “Mother Russia,” a huge steel-plated sculpture of a woman holding a shield and a sword, who makes the statue of liberty look like a dwarf. We walked down the patriotic war memorial, with huge granite sculptures of soldiers, and a driving tour gave us hints of where the communists used to have their offices. We spent hours at a “museum under the open sky,” where we walked around a huge, beautiful park filled with green fields, gardens and flowers, and houses from the different regions in Ukraine, as they were back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of the houses were set up with furniture as they would have been used hundreds of years ago. The weather was absolutely perfect, and the day was spent doing lots of walking (wear good shoes!) in the sunshine, seeing people from all over the world enjoy this beautiful place. We enjoyed the food and people-watching (as well as being watched by children who were fascinated with us because we spoke English), listening to all the different languages spoken, and talking Natasha’s ear off as we anticipated the next few days and weeks of our adoption journey. We are trying to soak up as much Ukrainian culture as we can in this “short” time here, hoping to help preserve as much of Tanya and Viktor’s culture, language and heritage as possible.
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AuthorI am Rachel, a Jesus-follower, a wife and mother, passionate about life and love and the gospel. I am a recovering perfectionist, who has realized lately that that is a slow death. I am broken, and have come to a place where I desperately need God to strengthen me in my weakness because without him, I am nothing. Archives
February 2013
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