On the way to Almaty

 We boarded our plane for Frankfurt at 4:20 pm on Monday, April 16th.  It was a 10 hour flight to get there.  We arrived at about 10 am in the morning on Tuesday.  Our flight on to Kiev did not take off until 10 that night, so we checked our carry-on luggage at the airport and went into town to take a bus tour of the city.  To the right is a shot of the skyline of downtown Frankfurt as we were crossing the river, Main.

After driving and seeing the city for a while we got off at the town square.  You can see the gold man on a box on the left that looks like a statue.  His intention is to look like a statue but to get you to put some money in the little box just in front of his feet.  The building in the background is a government building where a lot of marriages take place on the weekend.  It is common to see several different gatherings of people all celebrating different marriages in the square.  The morning was brisk so we grabbed some hot chocolate at a cafe on the square.

From the town square, we walked a little way to see this excavation of Roman baths which were just behind a Catholic church that you can see in the background.

 The Catholic church in the previous picture was almost completely destroyed as was most of the city during WW II.  It was rebuilt.  This stained glass window was the only part which was not destroyed and dates from 1100 AD.

Our tour finished just outside the main train station where it had started.  We grabbed a bite to eat on a walking street where there were a lot of street vendors and then took a train back to the airport.  We tried to catch a few winks at the airport but it was difficult to sleep.

 We arrived in Kiev, Ukraine at 1:30 am, very tired.  We were met by a Church driver, Victor.  He took us to our hotel.  It was a brand new hotel within a 20 minute walk from our new temple there.  We got to sleep about 4 am.  Our driver met us a 8 am to take us to apply for our 30 day Kazakhstan visa.  Unfortunately we found out that the embassy was closed for a holiday that day.  So we had the driver drop us off back at the temple.  We went inside and the person working at the recommend desk was Brother Vershinan from Nizhny Novgorod.  It was wonderful to see him again.  Then, we waited at the temple patron hotel, which is on the temple grounds, till the session was over so that we could see the Kalyonovs who we had found out were leading that session.  He was our branch president in the Nizhny upper branch when we were there in 2009.  We first saw Irina and got big hugs.  She still looks wonderful, like she is in her early 20s and is now a proud babooshka (grandma).  She showed us pictures of her two grandsons.  Yuri came in a little later.  He was released last week end as branch president after 11 years.  He looked very relieved.  He told us they are still teaching the Strengthening Marriage and Strengthening Family Relations classes there which we helped them get started.  They have taught six marriage and 3 family relations classes to date and are very excited about how it is helping.  They said that the certificates they hand out still have Rick's signature on them.  A lot of non-members take the classes.

By this time we were very tired, having only a few hours sleep since we had left DFW.  We walked back to the hotel in the rain and took a long nap.  On Thursday, we went again to the embassy and applied for our visas.  They said it would be probably Monday, but may be Friday before our visas would be ready.  We got lucky and found out on Friday at 11 am that our visas were ready.  We rushed down to pick them up because the embassy closed at noon.  We got scheduled for a 10:30 pm, 5 hour flight to Almaty later that night.  We had time to kill.  We found out that our driver, Igor, also had a side business giving private tours of Kiev.  We signed up with him and he took us to see the sights.

On the Dnieper river, which divides the city, is this monument to three brothers and a sister who are the legendary founders of the city in the 5th century.  Wedding parties traditionally come to this site immediately after their ceremony to celebrate.

Standing very tall, overlooking the city is the Motherland statue built by Stalin with the order that it be taller than the Statue of Liberty.  It is part of a 25 acre section of the city called the Museum of the Great Patriotic War (WW II). 

Also included in this complex is "Lavra", which includes this beautiful cathedral.  There is also an active monastery there attended by over 300 monks.  Some of their habitats are underground but we didn't take time to tour those sites.  This site has been destroyed several times over the centuries as the city was conquered by different armies.

 Here is the back of the cathedral.  It is breathtaking in its beauty.

Marty Morris, one of our sons-in-law, said to us that we should see the "Golden Gates" when we were in Kiev.  This was one of the stops on our tour.  It is a gate that King Yaroslavl, the Wise, built in 1037 after visiting Constantinople and seeing their gate.  He wanted to build a gate bigger and better than the one he saw there to show he was the greater king.  The statue on the right is of King Yaroslavl.  This is the one that sent his son, Prince Yaroslavl, north and he founded the city of Yaroslavl in 1010, where we served in 2008.

This shot is taken looking through the holes in the gate.  The walls of the city were very thick as you can see.  This is the only part of the Gates that remain from the original.

This shows the bottom of the gate.  (Wouldn't want that gate falling on me.)

Next, we went to a city park for children which was beautifully decorated.  The two children, sitting on pillows, reaching out to each other across the walk, were cute with their fur hats on.

Here is the world's longest cat, or so our guide said, with a pretty cool cat in it's mouth.


We ate authentic Ukrainian food at a local restaurant and then were off to the airport for our 10:30 pm, 5 hour flight to Almaty.