We Made it!!!

We are here!!!

We landed here at about 1445 yesterday afternoon. The "terminals" do not exist at this airport. They drive the stairs straight up to your plane for you to get off and they bus you to the main building. When I was little, I remember the Asheville airport being like this; but, I haven't seen this in years. These pictures I took from the bus.

We made our way (ever so slowly) through Passport Control and retrieved our luggage. We ventured to the lobby and found our driver, Nico, waiting for us. He had us change money over into Grivnas immediately right there at the airport. These are some Grivnas...

Yesterday the exchange rate was 8 Grivnas to 1 USD so 200 Grivnas is $25. Yesterday we spent 730 Grivnas for all of our groceries, a phone card for our "cell phone" and for our driver (he also translated at the grocery store). That is about $90.

After we exchanged our money we said goodbye to the airport and drove into the capitol city:

Goodbye Airport!

Hello capitol city!

We went to the local grocery store. I think it is called the Mega Market (at least I can read Cyrillic - I don't always know what it says, but I can decode!) That was an experience. They have two aisles of beer (sold in singles), 2 aisles of liquor and 2 aisles of chocolate. :/ The bread is baked fresh. They don't sell bread like we buy bread; it is all fresh. They also have whole fish for sale...they stare at you as you walk buy...they also have fish tanks (like lobster tanks) where you can choose your fish. I didn't take any pictures of the inside of store because I thought that would be rude. We bought our groceries (390 Grivnas) and a prepaid cell minutes card so we can call our facilitators and we headed "home".

These are the chips we bought. They are like sour cream and onion but not; they are  more like cheese and onion.

We got to our apartment and headed up the weirdest elevator...long and skinny. We made it to our apartment which has 2 front doors that both lock. Also strange. We unpacked our groceries, got our tutorial from Nico and then settled in for the night. Here are some pictures of our apartment!

The view from our bedroom window.

We are 9 floors up. (I'm surprised Brian took this picture...)

Our front entry way. That is the jacket that only cost me 16 quid at Primark!

Our kitchen. Ever so small with a REAL gas oven. You know, the ones you have to turn on the gas and light with a  match! I had fun making grilled ham and cheese on fresh ciabatta last night!

The smallest washing machine ever...no dryers.

Our living room/bedroom/office

It would have been made but Brian got out of the bed to take the pictures for me. He's so nice! :)

That's all so far. We were offered to be taken to the WWII museum today but honestly we are happy sitting and doing nothing. We have done nothing but go-go-go for almost a week and it's nice to have nothing to do. It's past noon and we are both still in PJs and have no desire to leave the apartment.

Our SDA appointment is tomorrow at noon our time (5 am EST time). We will apply for our referral maybe answer a few questions and thats' it. We *might* find out more about Sterling...we might not. Anyway, I'll post more tomorrow!!!

If you have any questions post them and I'll answer the best that I can!!!

*Forgive any typos....*