Dead monks and miniatures

6/10/09

Alex couldn’t sleep so he decided to write an update to our blog!

Today we are waiting to go back to the SDA office to get our paperwork so that we can take the night train from Kiev to Dnipro so we can go see Katya. Since we are stuck in Kiev for the day, we are going to go to the church with the dead monks. Only Allie and I are going today and Ann, Tony, and her mom will go on their way back through Kiev. Other fellow adoption bloggers have talked about the church in the past so I won’t cover too many details but I will post a couple of pictures (later). When we got to the church, I asked Elena if they had any art museums on the church grounds. She said they did and took me to a hall that had about 20 miniatures. Now when I say miniatures, I don’t mean doll house sized art but in fact ant sized pieces of art. You have to view them through a microscope style viewing piece. I was very fascinated by what I saw. There was a book that had writing and, from what I could tell, had at least one page that flipped. There was a chess board placed on the head of a pin, three men riding camels towards a pyramid which fitted within the eye hole of a needle, and much more. These miniatures were the highlight for me.

After looking at the miniatures, we took a very, very, very, very, very long walk to the caves to see the monks. Allie got scared watching Monsters Inc. and Spiderman so I was a little worried about how she would react to the dead monks. She said it was “no big deal”. It wasn’t very exciting but amazing that people lived down here. Allie seemed to walk briskly past the monks coffins but wouldn’t look over at them, despite the fact that they are covered. I kept asking her if she was ok and she kept saying she was fine. We got to a room that had a monk and I looked over and noticed I could see his hands. I told Allie and asked if she wanted to see them. She quickly answered no so we didn’t stay in the caves much longer. When we got top side we started the very long walk off the church grounds. It took forever to get out and I think we sat down to rest at least once. I know this walk was hard on Allie because it was hard on me and I usually don’t have a problem walking a lot. We go to Disneyland about once a year and walk for three days straight. When we went to Disneyworld, we walked for five days straight and it was even muggier and hotter than it is here but for some reason this was probably the hardest walk I’ve ever had. So I can imagine how hard it is for Allie. We finally got out and went into an air conditioned café, which wasn’t very cool, and had ice cream and waited for our ride to come get us.