saturday

This weekend has been good. I ended the week happily and went over to Taylor and Julie's for the night. We watched moulin rouge, which was my first time ever, and how I have no idea.. loved it.

Saturday morning the ward has a service project organized. We went to babi yar park, a memorial site where the largest shooting during the holocaust took place. We raked up all the leaves and made it look beautiful. 

During this shooting, the Nazis lined up the people along this ravine. When they shot them their bodies would fall down and be left there. They were left for two years until they came and burned everything before the Russian armies came in. 

We got a lot of WWII history on our two week trip, being in germany, and poland, and I never realized the history that is right here where I'm living. Oksana, my host mom, also said there was a concentration camp not too far from our house, and now it is just a memorial. She said she'd take me to see it. 

After the project we headed into the city over to souvenir street. I finally got to walk down the entire street. I've been about four times now and nobody will ever go all the way with me, finally I did. Scored some antique postcards, and found some books. 

There was also a staircase I've never seen before. The stairs are super steep and it goes pretty high up to this look out point. It was gorgeous. You could see all of Kiev. And seeing the whole city made me really sad, here is this massive place that I am living and I don't even know any part of it. I feel like I haven't gotten to know the city, which is something I wish I could. I know that there is so much to see, I just haven't seen it yet and my time is running out. I don't really get the opportunity to just walk around the city. Thats one of my favorite things to do, and its something that I really miss about Paris and living in a city where you can do that. 

 Lovely magnets of the nasty food I am so incredibly sick of. Who would want these?

 here's the view^^

 there's my st. andrews. love that building

typical ukrainian. look at all those flowers. these headbands are my favorite! I'll be making those a fashion when I get back.

Afterwards I went over to the Chernobyl museum. It was really awesome. I loved the entire set up of the museum and how everything was displayed. It also had a ton of cool information, like stories on specific people, different hero's and everything that happened during that time. It was pretty crazy, and great to learn about.

By the time we were out of there it was maybe four in the afternoon. But by walking outside you'd think it was eleven o'clock at night. It gets dark here so early now. I hate it. 

On my way home I decided to just ride the metro to the end of my line. I've never been to the end, so I stayed on and then walked out the exit. Nothing special, just some apartment buildings. It was nice to sit on the metro by myself though. I love doing that.