St. Sophia's Cathedral

I don't know how time gets away from me so fast here.  I mean to blog right after I do something adventurous or touristy and then I realize that it is Wednesday and I still haven't written about what I did last Saturday!  Oh the craziness of teaching 4 and 5 year olds.....
So I woke up early on Saturday and got ready to meet my group at St. Sophia's Cathedral in the center of Kiev.  Of course it was raining outside.  Not too much fun to walk around in.  It turns out most of my group was pretty smart and stayed home instead of dealing with this horrid weather.  There were only 5 of us who met up at the cathedral.  We had lots of fun taking pictures out front and acting very touristy.

We spelled ILP!can't really tell....but we tried!

Katie and I jumping for joy!

After playing around out front, we finally went inside the grounds and found our tour guide.  She took us into the cathedral and told us about the history.  It is a very very old building and a lot of the paintings on the walls are still the originals.  Of course we couldn't take any pictures in there though.  We tried sneaking a few, but got caught.  This cathedral is not used for any church related matters anymore.  It is now a museum.  Our tour guide then took us around to other buildings located inside the grounds.  I don't remember what those were used for, but they were set up as living areas.  She also took us to see a very cool mural that was built on the wall made out of painted eggs.  It was awesome!

We then headed towards the bell tower and climbed up the stairs to the lowest level.  It had a great view of St. Michael's Cathedral that is located across the street.

It looked very pretty with the sunny reflecting off the gold rooftops through the cloudy sky.  It was freezing up there though because the wind was blowing.  We climbed all the stairs to the very top and looked out over the city.  We didn't stay up there very long though because we felt like our faces might freeze off!  I took a picture of the thermometer they had hanging on the wall at the entrance.

It should not be this cold in October!!haha  No snow yet though.  After that we went to eat lunch at a cute cafe.  We then met up with some more people from our group and wanted to go down souvenir street, but it started pouring down rain.  I was sopping wet!  So we decided to just head back to an apartment and get dry and warm. We hung out for a while and just got to know each other more.  It was lots of fun!  It is crazy how we have all grown to really enjoy each others company in such a short time.  Kiev has defiantly been fun.  I can't believe I am already half way done with my time here!