you put de lime in de coconut...

Link to Manyava Monastery: https://picasaweb.google.com/nundabud/ManyavaOrthodoxMonastery?authkey=Gv1sRgCLiL2Oi6trD7qQE

Bright and early Tuesday morning, I was catching up with my blog, Rostek's mother came over to the house we were staying in (her mother's) and started getting food ready for breakfast:  salad, hard boiled eggs, vareniky stuffed with potato and cheese fried in butter, holodets (a jellied dish with meat and carrots and other things eaten cold). I walked around a little and took a few pictures of Kalush.  We took a taxi to the bus then on to Iv-Frankivsk.  We put our luggage in a locker and walked into the city.  I took a few pictures.  We met Igor and Bogdan and took increasingly smaller buses and a taxi to the Orthodox monastery of Manyava.  It is in the foothills of the Carpathians and is in the process of being built.  We had a picnic by a stream for a few hours and then took a bus to a taxi to a bus to Frankivsk.  I will NEVER take my car for granted again.  I wish you could have seen some of the buses and especially the last taxi we rode in!  So far, almost all taxi drivers have driven like bats out of hell!  Oh, did I mention squeezing five of us in taxis plus the driver?  Did I mention that generally taxis are small cars?  When we got back to Frankivsk, we walked on a really cool street of shops and restaurants where no traffic is allowed.  We sat outside (some patrons had blankets wrapped around them) and I restored my quota of caffeine.  When it was time for the train, we walked to the baggage locker, reclaimed our bag and headed for the train.  Igor and Bogdan stood with us on the platform until it was time to leave.  I was in a first class cabin with three stranger, two men and a woman.  They were strangers to each other, too.  Denis and Rostek shared a cabin with a married couple with a two year old.  I got the better deal.
Surprisingly, I slept, not well, but I slept.  Fourteen hours on a train is a long long time.  My cabin-mates were all considerate.  No one talked to anyone else.
When we finally reached Kiev, we took a taxi to the apartment and I will have a quiet day making phone calls, planning for travel and catching up with old friends.  I will also speak to my language teacher to set up tomorrow's lesson and perhaps coffee with a friend I haven't met yet in person.