Business has called myself and Jay to the Ukraine, for a week long trip to the city of Odessa. We left for LAX around 11 AM, Jen was nice enough to get some lift to the airport. We boarded our Monday, 1:45pm flight over to Amsterdam on KLM. The 10 hour voyage turned out to be quite pleasant, due to Jay’s selecting of the emergency exit row, and the very friendly, very Dutch service.


Our layover in Amsterdam was four hours, which consisted of us checking out lounges in the airport, finding some good coffee, avoiding the smoke from the casino, and generally checking out my first bit of foreign soil in about a decade. We found the direct airport announcements to tardy travelers to be quite humorous - ”you are delaying the flight”


The delightful european/dutch tone began to to get a bit more serious as we headed over to our Ukrainian International flight into Kiev. Jay & I both slept for couple hours on this flight (The crying babies didn’t even phase us).

We landed safely in Kiev and proceeded through my first customs experience in a while. Of course I promptly whipped out my camera, which drew serious ire from the security force.
We made the most of our 4 hours in the Kiev airport, exchanging some money, finding some pizza, trying to figure out how to get on our flight to Odessa. The Kiev airport, though definitely Ukrainian, was fairly nice and modern was a pretty good place to spend a few hours. Jay did a similar flight last February, and I could see how much more harrowing it was be to traveling alone & in the winter. It’s nice to have someone familiar with the suroundings & to speak English to. Everyone seems to know a bit of English, but I have a feeling our mileage may vary.









The flight to Odessa was running a bit late, but we made it safely and my favorite part was when the entire plane erupted in applause upon landing. Slightly odd, but hey. Irene, from Sigma Ukraine our development partner, was there to pick us up and take us to our hotel.
Sleep, well not so good, but that is life on the other side of the world.