It's high time I posted something.

I feel like a stranger to my own blog.

My excuse is that I have been on a 16 day vacation and have had an obvious lack of time for blogging and such like that. But in all honesty I've just been sort of lazy, a bit scatter-brained, and totally unmotivated. Which turns out to be a terrible combination.

So it's high time I posted something. I have plenty of things to post about (my vacay to Portugal being one of them) but today I just wanted to post links to two things about Kiev, both of which are thanks to my dear friend Alena.

The first is a link to one of her blog posts about Kiev. It's a list of everything a wandering American might notice during their first couple weeks in Ukraine and she nailed it on the head. I couldn't have said it better. Obviously, because I'm sending you to her blog to read about it.

The second is an article by a former editor of the Washington Post (that I stole from Alena's FB status) about his year in Kiev. It's good stuff.

And just for the record, this post is more for my benefit than for anyone else's enjoyment (because it's serving as a journal for me), but even still, I hope you learn something about the place I've called home for the last six months (and will only be calling home for the next week and a half... sniff, sniff).

Oh and thanks, Alena, for doing all the leg-work for my blog post. You are so utterly cool!