Saturday we took our group of American visitors on an excursion to a local tourist attraction, Sviatagorsk. It is an Orthodox monastery built on the side of a cliff and nearby is a recreation area for swimming, picnicking and boating. On the site are catacombs where monks were buried several hundred years ago, but although our group left early in the morning, but didn’t arrive early enough to get a tour of the inside of the churches and catacombs in the monastery. But we still had fun hiking to the top of the hill, taking lots of pictures, picnicking and souvenir shopping. A friend from Donetsk helped lead the group, since I had never been there, so Dave and I had fun being tourists as well. There aren’t many tourist attractions in the Donetsk area, so Sviatagorsk was a nice change. The monastery and churches in the complex are still functioning, so women had to wear head scarves and skirts and men long pants when on the grounds to show respect for the holy site. On the way home we stopped at a roadside produce stand and people had fun buying apricots and honey to take back to Donetsk. I enjoyed the scenery on the drive to and from ... most of my travel outside of Donetsk has been by train or marshrutka (taxi van), neither of which offer a very clear view of the landscape. It was a long day but nice to take some time to see the local sites that we hadn’t seen yet. And on our way into Donetsk we stopped at McDonald's to make everyone who was tired of eating cabbage and kasha happy.
Laura
