Travel to travel

When we were here in 2008 we did almost no travel.  I could count the number of cities I saw on one hand and only our 36 hour trip to Yalta was for fun.  In fact, our only legitimate attempt at seeing what Europe has to offer resulted in our being banned from re-entry to Ukraine for 4 months.

This year all that is going to change.  Here is the line-up for the next few months:

• Next Tuesday Jenya, Sergey and I are going to see Shakhtar play in Donetsk.  The trip also involves a day in Kharkov (Ukraine's second city), coming AND going, plus almost an entire day in Donetsk itself.  All of these are firsts for me.
• Soon after I return, I will be going to Kiev with Andrey to the embassy of Belarus to work on our visas for.....

.... our missions trip up north!  I call it a missions trip because Belarus is almost as inaccessible as Russia, particularly for Americans and we are taking our staff and volunteers to run a camp.  For many of them it will be the first time outside their own culture (though not that far outside) and it will give them insight on how the internationals feel when they come to the Hope Center.

For those of you who want the practice, Tanya is planning to blog the trip in Russian!  For the rest of you, I'll be doing it in English as well.

For the other trips, you'll just have to wait till I get back to hear updates.