Running And Golden Onions

So, I did a 5 k run last night. I know! I surprise even myself. My time was 31.52. Nicole, the now sacked Personal Trainer, had originally said I should be able to complete in under 30 mins. I only stopped the Personal Training because I invariably ignored most of her advice (although most of it was sound) and because she was very expensive. She is lovely though, so don't be thinking she isn't.

Anyway, when she said I'd be able to do the run in 30 minutes, she hadn't accounted for me drinking my body weight in strong lager and Ukrainian vodka the night before the race. I'm such a ninkempoop. I think she might have been right and 30 minutes might have been achievable had I made more time for training over the last few weeks and at least had a night off the booze, the night before.

I was gigging, I was out with my little Sprogling. I needed that booze! *ahem*. Party Piece was nice (the gig Tuesday). Norm came along to support and brought me some interesting reading on common mistakes of the stand up comic. Saw the lovely funny charming Dave Gibson again. I did the material I'd tried out the week before at Open mic olympics, which seemed to go down quite well. It didn't feel like it went brilliantly in terms of audience laughs, but it felt ok.

Oh it has been too long my friends. Kiev seems like a distant memory now and it was only four days ago. Kiev was smashing. It had lots of churches with golden onions on the top.

Here is a picture of the scary entrance to our apartment. We arrived at night and there were no lights in this rather dingy hallway...

The apartment once we were in though was very nice... Here is a picture of my travel buddy Ann in the apartment. She is probably arranging the contents of her handbag for the seventeeth time.

On Saturday we went and found the lavra monastry where the bodies of the monks are kept. The caves where the bodies are were cool and only lit by candles. The bodies themselves in glass coffins and they all looked like tiny little fellas. They were all covered up with religious cloth, so we didn't really get the gruesome spectacle we had expected. All very respectful in fact and we felt a bit naughty for our motives for visiting. We hid it well though and pretended to be genuine pilgrims.

Here is the view of the monastry as we approached it.

This is just one of the big onion churches within the grounds of the monastry

No pictures in the caves. Soz!

Sunday we adventured across town to a place called Andreevsky's Spusk (or something along those lines.) This is the church there...

We were recommended that part of Kiev because of a long winding street with lots of arts and crafts stalls. For arts and crafts, please read TAT. Still, we saw quite a few of the other city sights on the way up to the area, including amazing metro stations and more golden onion buildings, so it was worth the journey.

Overall lots of fun was had with finding our way around, including the obligatory spend twenty minutes finding the metro station, get the metro two stops, spend ten minutes finding way out of metro station - find yourself ten minutes up the road from where you started. Any foreign visitor to any big city has to do that before deciding to stick with the map and walking. It is all part of the fun!!

If you go, do try the metro and carry a map with both alphabets on it, it will help you be able to say the station names as well as read them when you are in the stations (that is my top Kiev travel tip as it goes.) The stations were truly amazing. The longest escalators I've ever seen in my life and really ornate stations as well. This one had mad chandaliers in.

Even though we didn't have time to see Kiev properly or really appreciate everything it had to offer, I'm glad I got that brief taste of the place. It isn't really geared up for tourists, only the odd younger person will speak English and most signs are in cyrillic, so you have to think about things a bit in a different way and use your survival instincts. It was all over in a flash and time to come home far too soon.

Cradley Heath with Norm and Peter tonight. Don't let on, but I'm only going for the free chip butty.