Second appointment scheduled

We stayed close to home today so we could go at short notice to the SDA to sign an acknowledgement of our appointment if we got a call. We finally got the call close to 4 p.m. Also, they made an exception and said that we could sign at the time of our appointment, which was fine with us. This is exactly the news we were praying for: the appointment is Wednesday at noon, which is about the earliest we could have hoped for.

Since we have a little time to ourselves this time in Kiev, we have been able to connect some of the areas we reached in our first weekend by car and metro and feel more comfortable getting around on our own. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, so we decided to go for a touristic walk of the side of downtown Kiev that we aren't familiar with yet, which includes historic aristocratic

residences, the government buildings, and the parks along the river. Some of the highlights were the presidential administration building, the parliament, and some monuments in the gorgeous parks; I'm pretty sure that Kiev beats Edmonton as the greenest metropolis I have seen.

We ended the walk by St Michael's church (just up the hill from our apartment).

Our apartment is in a very convenient location overlooking the main Independence Square, which includes a two-level, underground, Western-style mall below the glass dome. (There is another underground mall nearby that is basically a long chain of stores that runs underneath the city's main street. Under many major streets in the city, pedestrian underpasses and metro accesses contain a surprising number of stores, vendors, and sometimes even restaurants.)