Journey & arrival

Well we have officially arrived. For any of you worried that we were caught up in all the hullabaloo in Heathrow- no we missed it by a day. We only found out about it when we got to the camp.

So the journey.

Our first stop where we all met up was Heathrow. Despite finding out that the luggage policy that we had been told about wasn’t going to come into practice until the 7th October (meaning that we had to pay for the crate of t-shirts to be taken as excess baggage) checking was straightforward and uneventful. Unfortunately though at Heathrow we had to say goodbye to Cherith who decided that the trip wasn’t the right thing for her to be doing. However the rest of us found the American members of the team, stocked up on chocolate in WHSmiths, boarded, found our seats and settled down for our flight. 3 hours later we arrived in Kiev- the capital of Ukraine. Once in Kiev we were met by Igor, a Ukrainian who works for Global Action in Ukraine. He, along with his ten year old son Dominic, got us into a minibus and then gave us a tour of Kiev town centre. We stopped after a bit and had coffee (koфe) and cheese cake. You might think this would be a simple task, especially when you have a native speaker with you- no such luck. We were a large group with lots of different orders and the waitress kept bringing out the wrong number of each thing. So we all swapped and changed orders about five times to make sure that everyone had something.
Next was off to Freedom Square where a political rally was going on.

Now this might sound quite exciting but the Ukrainian political situation has been so turbulent these last few months that the average Ukrainian has completely lost interest. They were all interested in the football though. It appeared that Kiev were playing a big match so there were football fans out in the masses. Wading though them we managed to see freedom square itself and the shopping centre, which has been built behind and beneath the square. Then dinner. Now dinner was in a self service restaurant, we however had no idea how many options there were, what everything was and with there being 14 of us Igor was struggling to answer all the questions along the line. So we pointed and picked, and then picked again when we realised there was more appealing stuff further along the line. Finally after a game of balance three trays on a small round table we sat down to eat. It wasn’t half bad either- well most people thought it was OK, there were a couple of trips back up the line to replace a few items.
After dinner it was back into the minibus and off the station. I have never in my life seen such a grand station. It was beautiful, with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and moulding along the ceiling. Beautiful as it was the escalators weren’t working so we had to lug our cases up the grand staircases into the VIP room. I have no idea what you do to get into the VIP room, but Igor sorted it out for us and it meant we had comfy seats to sit while we waited. The station was an… experience for may of the team who got their first taste of ‘the squatty loo’ For any of you lucky enough not to know what this is, well it a toilet consisting of a hole in the ground over which you ‘squat’. It’s an interesting position to try and hold for any length of time, especially as you are also tying to keep clothing off the floor and out of your way! OK enough grossing you all out and back to the story.
Our train left Kiev at 10:49, so about half an hour before this we were allowed to board. Oh I should mention that at this point Igor had left us. Thankfully though we were joined by Andrea who is an Austrian who speaks fantastic English and has been living in Kiev for the past… year I think, so has pretty good Russian as well. So Andrea sorted out our rooms, the hiring of sheets and the checking of tickets. Once the novelty of staring out the carriage windows ran out (well it was dark by this time so there was next to nothing to see) we all started the long process of queuing for the single toilet. Finally we got to bed.
Although many of the team got up earlier, some of us were woken up by a random blast of Ukrainian radio coming through the sound system. Ukrainian radio is funny. We heard English, French and songs in either Russian or Ukrainian (the two languages are very similar and to a our ears sounded identical). The rest of the train journey was spent practicing bible talks, and crafts, sleeping and learning Russian.
We were met off the train by Simon, who helped us dump our stuff in the minibuses and they took us for lunch- in McDonalds. So we had team members carrying out 16 double cheeseburgers and 16 lots of fries. It didn’t take long for it all to disappear.
The minibus journey was our final leg. It took us about 4 hours with a stop off at a mountain spring and also at the Kerch sign
Finally though we had arrived at the hope Center (well Americans set it up so technically speaking I should write it ‘er’ not ’re’).
For me this was a bit over whelming, 85 of the kids were already there, as were the Ukrainian staff, interpreters and the interns so we had a lot of new stuff and a lot of new people all in one go. Those who had been before though had a great time saying hi to those that had been there last year and exploring for changes.
Dinner was chicken and mashed potato- a very normal and yummy dish. Finally we had a brief team meeting before heading off for a very welcome sleep.