Kiev Trip (Part 2) -- Day 760

I think I left off after our second day in Kiev. It was really that day and afterwards that Anna started having fun all of time. We started off finding the parks. Anna called them "sandy parks" because many of them were full of sand. After pushing the stroller up the hill on the first day, I found the funicular which made the trip much easier. Anna, of course, loved the funicular too.

During one of Anna's days at the park, she saw some older boys running around, and Anna wanted to join in the fun, so she just started chasing them. The boys were just doing their own thing, sort of ignoring her and any chasing that may have occurred by Anna was purely coincidental. She just happened to be running when they were running. But she had the biggest smile on her face. Unfortunately after she started to get in the way, the boys sort of indicated that they wanted her to stop bothering them . It was a little sad, but she had so much fun. I just made up some story that the boys were tired and couldn't run anymore. Anna still talks about how she was chasing the boys at the park and she just starts smiling big.

The nice thing about the parks was that they all had swings. Swings are very uncommon in DC. I don't know if it is a liability thing or not, but it was great to have plentiful swings throughout Kiev. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for Anna just to swing for 45 minutes straight with no break. That made for a pretty dynamic time on my part.

On the third day we took a boat ride on the Dnieper, but the real boat fun came about a week later when we took a sail boat for an all-day trip on the river. Everything went well and there were two other young kids on board. One of the passengers on the boat planted the idea in Anna's head that there was a 'boatasaurus' in the hull. Anna probably looked for an hour or so into the boat's interior counting boatasauruses. One of the pictures to the right is Anna looking for them.

The only down side to the trip was that as we were heading back, the wind just died completely and the motor was apparently at the shop. So we were afloat in some of the most placid water I have ever seen. As one hour stretched into two the captain had to call in to be towed back. It took about two hours longer to wait for the rescue boat and get towed in by another boat with a four-horse-power engine. Yes, I said four. The engine was smaller than a lawn mower and had about a quart-sized fuel tank. At one point we also got caught up on a sand bar. Eventually, we got loose but the arrival time of 5:00 pm eventually turned into an 8:00 pm arrival time. All this with a toddler who hadn't taken a nap. All in all, Anna did a great job and fell asleep soon after getting into the car seat for the ride back.

Half way through the sailing trip (before the wind died), we stopped to have lunch along the bank. We called it the island of Sodor, which is from Thomas the Train, and Anna had a wonderful time throwing stones into the river. We will have to take the trip again sometime, but hopefully with a motor in case the wind fails us.

Anna really liked Ukrainian food. There is a dish called vareniki, which is essentially small ravioli-like dumplings stuffed with things like cheese, meat, mushrooms, and cabbage. We would go to a fast-food place called Shvidko that served a variety of them, and Anna would eat most of her vereniki. One of the guidebooks even mentioned that it was the rare child that refused vareniki. How true that was.

We were lucky that in the vicinity of where we were staying we had some child-friendly places to eat. They even had a toy store around the corner where we could pick up assortments of plastic animals for her to play with. It is normally a challenge to eat out once a day or a couple of times a week at a restaurant, but during our trip we were eating out pretty much twice a day for over two weeks. That was a bit rough.

The amount of bribing we had to do to keep Anna in line during the trip was shameful and unfortunately Anna has picked up a few bad habits. But I guess when you are pushing her in a stroller and you are a 45-minute walk from our hotel and Anna just decides that she no longer wants to be in the stroller, you have to do something. Basically, she ended up eating enormous amounts of cheerios and trashing my travel guide. Eventually, I convinced her that whenever we went up and down a hill (which was a lot of the time), she had to sing songs. That worked pretty well, and I even got to listen to some of Anna's music.

It was a bit of a stretch entertaining Anna when we weren't doing something enormously fun. She must have read her books a few hundred times. The big hit (predictably) was the Richard Scary book about the airport. We also bought her some Dr. Seuss books while there. An English-language book store carried some children's books, and it was very nice to top off our book supply. When I was looking through the books, I noticed some good Dr. Seuss that I hadn't seen in the US, so we snatched them up. The problem was that there is probably a reason they don't sell them in the US anymore. The Wocket in My Pocket and Hunches in Bunches clearly introduced Anna to the concept of spooky, scary things. She would wake up in the morning pointing at an area of the room and say, "There is a Vug under the rug," or "There is a Waset in the closet." I didn't quite see that one coming.

Well, this post is getting too long and I had better attend to the baby girl. Oh yes, one more thing: Anna took a pony ride at Shevchenko Park. I sent some links to video of her riding earlier, but the second-to-last photo is of a pony, Anna, and Mommy.