St Sophia's Greek Orthodox Church

This is a lovely picture I got of off a Google search.  It shows the really pretty color of the church.  When we first got there we just sat for about twenty minutes and relaxed.  This is the stop that made me realize how hard it is to travel in non-English speaking foreign lands.  Most of the time I have traveled (in Europe, Middle East, Africa) there have always been lots of English signs, English speakers, tour guides, etc.  This was the first time I went to a foreign country and had none of those to help me.  Jeff was with me so he was able to navigate us around quite a bit, but he speaks and reads Russian, not Ukrainian.  With the liberation of the Ukraine from Russia, there has been a bit of National Pride which has replaced a lot of the former Russian name plates, descriptions, menu's etc with Ukrainian.  

To enter the compound you have to go through the bell tower.  We finished our visit by climbing up the tower.  I knew it did not bode well when we started our trek up the tower through a hole in the wall.  It was not much larger than we are.  It caused me to wonder how people who were larger than Jeff and I would be able to make it into such places, however, now that I reflect on it I only recalled seeing two people who were overweight (by appearances) and at that nothing compared to what we see in the United States.  This may have to do with the amount of walking one must do in the Ukraine or it could do with the amount of support we give in the United States to make all places accessible to all people.

Now to the part I would prefer to avoid, but will share anyway.  First of all I have a slight claustrophobia which for the most part I dealt with just fine.  The bell tower brought out my acrophobia.  I was OK as long as I kept my self looking forward or at my feet.  If I looked over the side from the stairs, oh, it was not good.  I found at the second level up I was able to go up to fine.  It had a solid complete floor.  Then we had to go up about 3 more flights of stairs to the third level to which I basically clung to the walls (go ahead and start laughing now).  Jeff wanted to go to the top level, I told him to go for it, I wasn't going up anymore stairs.  I should have taken a picture of the stairs for you.  They looked like they were glued up, no iron beams, no walls, etc.  The were "caged in" so that you could not drop something off the side of the stairs.

These last two pictures are ours.  It really is a beautiful place to visit.