We are in Kiev!

We landed in Kiev around 2:00 p.m. today. Sergey was waiting for us outside of customs. Of course he told us his English was "not good, very little," but he was being modest as he was able to point out sites and tell us a lot of Ukrainian history on our way in to our apartment. For those of you traveling, when you enter the customs area, the first line is for Ukrainian citizens. The middle two to six lines say "Passport Control", and those are the lines you need to get into. We were not sure what the line on the far side of the building was for. No one approached us, but we had already taken John & Twyla's advice and filled out our customs forms ahead of time and did not take out our blue American passports until the last minute. It was snowing when we landed with low visibililty, so hopefully it will be clearer tomorrow so we can see some of the impressive achitecture better! We have a lovely apartment two blocks from independence square with hot water, internet, washing machine and a small kitchen. Sergey drove up a good sized curb to park on the sidewalk in front of the bank/pharmacy so we could change some money. The dollar is very strong right now in Kiev, 7.5 grivna for $1. Just a month ago it was 5 grivna for $1. We were supposed to meet Felix & Heidi tonight and their new kiddos, but due to the snow we have postponed it until tomorrow when they are coming in to Kiev anyway for some of their final paperwork. I am still amazed that we will be having dinner with them in Ukraine when we live 10 minutes away from each other in Colorado! We can't wait to meet their three new children and catch up with our good friends. In Frankfurt there were smoking rooms that people would walk in to smoke cigarettes. They held about 10 people and must have had some kind of ventilation, but they were filled with smoke. Tomorrow we are going to explore indpendence square. We are going to work on uploading our pictures next, and we will create a link on our blog to it.