The Sunflower

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Good morning!

I am sitting at my little desk in my sweet room at the Sunflower B&B Hotel in Kiev.

Observation 1) It has a really great shower. Period. Better than ours at home. As I understand it, all of Kiev gets hot water as a utility. The down side of this is that it can be turned off for whole neighborhoods at a time. The up side is that there is no limit to how much you get. No running out of hot water in the shower. So my first shower in two days was plentiful. Great water pressure. In a cute little bathroom. The day has started well.

Observation 2) Having breakfast come to your room is also a really good way to start the day. 'Nuff said.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. Our trip to get here went without hitches. Our lovely neighbor Liz Gomoll got us to the airport on Wednesday at 5:30 for a 7:45pm flight. We got through the lines quickly and had plenty of time to enjoy dinner at Wolfgang Puck Express before getting on the plane.

The cool new thing on Delta international flights is the movie on demand feature. Many of the movies recently up for best picture were available for watching. I chose Black Swan. (Jan chose sleep.) Wow. What a movie. And then I tried to sleep.

Jan's brother Rick, his wife Libby and their friend Lowell found us having tea at the Starbucks in the Amsterdam airport. No problem. We went through security screening again at the gate for our plane. The best memory was seeing a Babushka (the stereotypical old Ukrainian grandma with a scarf over her head) get selected to be patted down by security. Then Libby got patted down. Libby is busty. They checked her bra to make sure there were no weapons in there. Come to think of it. The babushka was kind of busty, too.  Hmmm. They are clearly doing profiling of big busted women at that airport. Needless to say, I was not selected for pat down.

Jan and I actually traveled for 16 hours. But because Kiev is 8 hours ahead of Minnesota, we arrived just about 24 hours later. On three hours of sleep.

Peter met us at the airport, took us by taxi to our hotel to leave our luggage, and then straight on to his apartment for a dinner party with Trish's family and a friend from London named Duncan. We had a great time getting to know everyone and making toasts to the lovely couple. And the dinner was awesome, anchored by grilled meats delivered to the door as we would order Domino's Pizza. In Jan's delirium, he kept saying, "I love pickled beets." Don't ask. It makes no sense.

Did I mention 3 hours of sleep and 24 hours travel?

We are taking our time getting a little settled in this morning. At 11am Peter and Trish will get here to take us off exploring. (Also watching  TV about the tragedy of the huge earthquake in Japan. Wow.)