Our Journey to Kiev

We have officially arrived in Ukraine!! The journey to get here was a little bit longer than we expected but we are so happy to be here! Our 10 hour flight from Portland to Frankfurt was great (never thought we'd say that about a long haul flight!). The food was good, flight was smooth, and we were both even able to get a few hours of sleep on the red eye flight which, along with a couple movies, helped the time pass rather quickly. After our 5 hour layover in Frankfurt we were told our last flight to Kiev was delayed shortly before it was scheduled to leave. The delay got longer and longer and finally the flight was cancelled. So at almost midnight we found out we were spending the night in Germany. Apparently many flights were cancelled because the line for a hotel voucher was nearly 3 hours long.  Fortunately we were told about how we could get reimbursed from the airline later instead of waiting for the voucher that night. We were able to find an info desk at the airport who booked us a hotel and we were at least able to get some sleep in a bed and a shower before continuing our journey, which now consisted of two flights the next day. Our first flight to Munich was boarded and ready to go when we found out it would be 1-2 hours before we could take off... Fortunately it was only an hour and we made the short hop over to Munich for another 5 hour layover before flying to Kiev.  As we went through passport control in Kiev we weren't given a stamp in our passports. We were assured that our passports were registered in the computer and it would be no problem. This seemed odd to us so we mentioned it to our facilitator who picked us up at the airport. He was concerned about this since a copy of the stamp in our passport will be needed for adoption paperwork later on. Fortunately he helped us, for probably close to an hour, going all over the airport, until we finally found the right person who would stamp our passports (which the customs officer was supposed to do all along). Finally around 1:00 in the morning we got to our apartment which will be our home until we are able to travel to the region our child is in (hopefully later next week). Today our facilitator will show us around and hopefully we will learn enough to be able to get by for the next several weeks wherever we are in the country. We are so excited to finally be here!