Arrival in Kiev

For those of you who didn't know I was going to be spending a week in Ukraine teaching epidemiology... Surprise! I'm in Ukraine for a week to teach epidemiology. After far too many hours of travel by plane, train, and automobile (okay, just plane and automobile, no trains involved on this trip...so far), I checked into my hotel in Kiev. And what a lovely hotel room it is.

 My preceptor for this trip, Dr. Smoak, has been here for a week already doing the first part of the training (two weeks total: week one is to teach them epidemiology, week two is to evaluate them teaching the same lectures back. That's the part I'll be doing), so after I unpacked and cleaned up somewhat, she took me out to see the part of the city where we are and do some souvenir shopping. Here is one of the churches (I don't remember the name, but I'm going to find out):

This church also had a memorial for the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, pictured below:

To try to explain this famine briefly, without getting into complicated Soviet politics and history, in the Soviet system, there were common fields that all peasants were supposed to work, as well as small plots that individual/families maintained. In 1932, there was a pretty severe drought, and they discovered that people didn't really do anything in the common fields when there was work to be done on their own fields. So grain production was really, really far down. The Soviet solution to this was to take from the Ukrainian peasants who managed to produce anything, because they blamed the failure of the common fields on Ukrainian nationalism. In two years, millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death due to the Soviet distribution policies, which was later determined to be a form of genocide. If you look at censuses that were done around this time (a few years before and a few years after), the Ukrainian region was the only part of the USSR that had a decrease in population. So the Soviets were selectively starving Ukrainian. They were bad people. But we knew that.

On a happier note, here's another church. Dr. Smoak said that this one had specific cultural/historical significance, but she couldn't remember what it was.
 

And, finally, a picture of the statue of the architect of Kiev.

That was my day/last couple of days. A bit hectic and definitely exhausting, which is why I'm about to go to bed. Tomorrow, possibly more walking around/souvenir shopping, and then Monday we have to go to work.