First 2 days in Ukraine

It was a long flight but we made it here safe and sound. We couldn't sleep on the plane. I think we were just wired from all the anticipation. Unfortunately, they lost our luggage. Luckily, we carried on clothes for about a day so we had csomething to wear to the Adoption center. Hopefully we will get our bags tonight or tommorrow.

We are staying in a very small but clean apartment. The elevator is very small about 3.5 x 4 feet. It really made us nervous at first going up 8 floors. The building seems to be half vacant. We are lucky to have hot water. We have someone bringing us food. It is different than what we are used to but it has been pretty good. Kiev is much bigger than we expected. It is population of about 4 million but it is very spread out. It is very strange not being able to read the words on buildings because everything uses the cyrillic alphabet.

We were very tired yesterday from being up for over 24 hours. We are still feeling jet lagged.

This morning we had an appointment at the National Adoption Center. We did not find our child yet. It was recommended to us that we go look at a child to gain favor (to show we are serious about adopting). So tomorrow or the next day we will leave to go see a child. We do not expect that this will be our child due to severe health issues. We are not looking forward to doing this because it will be very hard emotionally. Hopefully this will help us get another appointment at the adoption center and we will find our healthy child.

We went in with a very open mind stating we would adopt a boy or girl under the age of 4. There were no children available that met this criteria. Our coordinator says that this is common and 70% of the people have to go for a second appointment. We are dissappointed but we are trying to stay positive. Please keep us in your prayers as we need them more than ever.

Tonight we took a walk in the neighborhood we are staying in. It is an older area that is run down by our standards. Ninety percent of the people here live in apartments. We haven't seen any stand alone homes. There is a lot of beautiful architecture in the down town area, lots of parks and high end shopping. We are staying about 30 minutes from down town. The weather is perfect. It gets into the 70's during the day and cools off at night. Tommorrow we may go sight seeing. Darren could really use a Budweiser right now. He (we) are going to try to get a beer tonight! It is nice to come to an internet cafe just to get the news on what is going on at home. We will hopefully be able to post soon and keep everyone updated.
Christine and Darren