We arrived in Ukriane Thursday afternoon. We made it all the way from Philadelphia without too much trouble. It was a 18.5 hour trip with about 15 hours in airplanes. We found it difficult to sleep in planes (and especially difficult to turn down an airplane movie). By the end of the trip we were exhausted. When we got to Ukraine, we slowly negociated our way through passport control and customs. We found the customs officers very helpful (I was a bit worried that would not be the case) and all of our luggage made it safely (at least we think it did). Liz Harder, fellow MCCer in Zaporozhye, was there waiting for us and drove us to the MCC office. The remainder of the day consisted of balancing exhaustion and friendliness while meeting a lot of people and trying to make positive first impressions.
We have spent the last two days trying to figure out some MCC FSU basics while seeing the sights and recovering from jet lag. The scenery is different and will take some getting used to but we are excited. We head to Donetsk tomorrow and that is when we finally get to unpack our suitcases and say "we're home."
Dave
