Day 4 I think...We are not in Kansas anymore

Wow -what a ridiculously long day this was. Train ride was a true experience I'm pretty sure I don't want to go thru again. Very shady, smelly, loud, dirty, disgusting etc. First time I felt nervous about our safety here. We did find out that the train is the only way to get to Kherson as there is no airport but we are going to look at the possibility of upgrading to 1st class on our next go around.

Arrived in Kherson at 4am where Tonya (our Kherson translator/facilitator) met us and got us into our apartment sometime around 5 or 6am. A few Tylenol pm's later, woke up around noon for Tonya to take us to lunch. Brief visit with ther but found out that Stas now will not be back from camp until Saturday. He was supposed to be back Thursday. So director wont be able to see us until Monday now... more delays.

Kiev was a much different place than Kherson - very European and we ran into people everyday who could speak English. No one speaks any English in Kherson and it is a much smaller town. We stand out a bit more here than Kiev.

Funny story... We went to the grocery store and Darcy purchased a diet coke. We walked out of the store, went for a small walk down the block and decided to return to the store to purchase the rest of our groceries for the rest of the week. Darcy carried around her diet Coke as we were shopping and once we checked out, two security people grabbed her and started taking her back to store. All we could understand was "diet coke" and they seemed to be pretty angry. I pulled out my wallet with the receipt, shoved in it the security guys face yelling "diet coke, diet coke". He finally looked at receipt, said "ok, sorry" and let us go. A little more scary than funny...

Anyways, just got internet working here about an hour ago and thought we would give an update. We are going to have a lot of downtime for the next few days and not much to do here. Tonya took us to the only restaurant that has an English translation next to each item but the food is a little different. I was torn between the horse meet appetizer or the lemon shrimp and went with the lemon shrimp. About a dozen shrimp came out with head and eyes still in tact. Hungry enough to peel head and skin off but Darcy lost appetite. We won't see Tonya tomorrow and will be on our own for the entire day so the restaurant should be interesting. Oddly, beer is quite easy to order off the menu.. go figure.

More stories tomorrow... 
Dave