May Holidays - Botanical Garden

May is the best month in Ukraine, since we have 5 holidays, and they all fall on Monday or Tuesday. I think we end up working one full five-day week. June also has two Monday holidays this year, but that's an anomaly.

So on the first long weekend, a celebration of May days from May 1-4, we went to the Botanical Garden here. Apparently, so did half of Kyiv as you can see from the photos. And the gorgeous, stately grand staircase was a total pain with a stroller, but we muddled through. There aren't too many photos of the actual flowers, since there really weren't that many of great note. And of course our darling oldest daughter is vehemently against posing properly in any photo, so here are the best options with mommy and daddy. She actually was happy, it's just hard to tell!

You'll see in one photo the crowds gathered around the magnolias, but if you've lived in Virginia, it's not as exciting. We were limited in our travel again, since there were lots of big down and up hills and little signs threatening ticks and bugs. We stuck to the path. Aaron took an artistic shot of people climbing a hill and you can see the church and statue of Mother Kyiv in the background. It was quite a hot day, so we had to stop and have ice cream, which was nice but there wasn't anywhere to sit other than on the garden, and we felt odd doing that.

What you can't see in the photos is a phenomonon familiar to those who have lived in the former Soviet Union - the floral cheesecake pose. That's where a woman or child stands pretty uch directly in a tree or in a flower bed and pulls a plant near their face and snaps a photo. It's very mid-80s, soft fade artistic. You'll see an example modeled by Aaron in the next set of photos - he is taking the mickey out of the Ukrainians.