List update

I added a few more items to each column in the What We Love in the US and Ukraine list.

US: ice and its easy availability (hotel ice machines rock, bags of ice you can buy in grocery stores are bee’s knees).

Ukraine: the free luggage carts at Boryspil airport; the way drivers thank each other on the road by flashing their hazards a couple of times (like if you move over towards the berm to let someone pass you on a narrow road) – one of the only polite things drivers do on the roads here.

What are your favorite things?

Weekend

We took the new-old Toyota for a test-run to Korosten this weekend, along with about 1/20th of our stuff to store there until after we move. Well, Igor called it 1/20th, I would call it 1/50th. But we’ll see.

Saturday was spent mostly at the table, with a gorgeous spread already set when we arrived. Being the guest-of-honor, Nina had prepared my favorite dishes, namely the evil-but-incredibly-delicious cream cheese and mashed nut “salad”, which is more of a spread, that I usually call “fat with cholesterol”. It’s a heart-attack-in-a-dish, but man is is every tasty. I indulged. The baked catfish was fabulous. The forest mushrooms were too die for. While we waited for the third course, shashlik, to cook, I picked cherries from the tree in the garden. I got all the fruit that was in reasonable reach, basically everything I could get without a ladder.

We brought with us a bottle of the deadly Georgian chacha, knowing that Igor’s family appreciates turpentine-like beverages. It stopped even Igor’s brother-in-law Vova in his tracks. After a two or three courses, Igor’s dad Ivan went to take a nap. After another hour or so, Vova went home to “take a nap.” A little while later I asked Igor if I could lay down for a bit. It wasn’t the chacha, but way too much food and several glasses of champagne, and I was ready for a nap myself. So I basically repeated last weekend’s escapade, only we didn’t have a housefull of guests ourselves. But I feel asleep around 7 on yet another Saturday night. Talk about feeling old! A few hours later Igor’s cousin Andrey called and said they had a Peace Corps Volunteer in their apartment. We did “paper-scissors-rock” to see if we would go over or not (only here it’s “paper-scissors-rock-well”, and Igor pretty much always wins since I always forget what beats “well” so he always picks “well”), and we went to Andrey’s. His wife Natasha is about 8 months pregnant and looks fantastic. The PCV turned out to have served in Turkmenistan about 10 years ago and has been in Ukraine a few months supposedly doing research for his dissertation, but from the looks of things, has spent a lot of energy on his Ukrainian girlfriend (who is a friend of Natasha – convoluted enough?)

We hung out and told jokes for a couple of hours, then headed home. Early Sunday morning, Igor’s mother woke us up with a “suggestion” that we go pick apricots with her. Igor buried his head under the pillow, so I got up to serve for the both of us. Four or five of us spent the next 45 minutes picking up the apricots Ivan shook out of the trees in the garden. By 9:30 we were at the market. We barely got to the spot Nina picked out and a woman bought a bucket of apricots from us (for 20 hrivna). Within a half hour, we’d sold all 5 buckets! Did a little shopping and headed home.

Igor, Ivan and Vova then started a thorough inspection of our new/old car. I know I’m supposed to go to the kitchen to help with the “women’s work”, but I’ve always been more interested in how a car works, so I stuck around with the guys. I can get away with it in part because I’m the only one who can read the English-language manual, so I’m needed for any questions that may come up (which inevitably do). We topped up the oil and anti-freeze, figured out how to put the back seats down to make a big trunk (not as straight-forward as one would think), and discovered all sorts of nooks and crannies in the car, including the jack that apparently no one else had found considering there was another jack in a box in the back of the car (it was under the back seat, which, as mentioned, was not as easy to move as described in the manual).

Another enormous meal, and we were directed to pick more apricots, which turned out to be for Igor and me to take to Kyiv with us. Yikes, we’ll never eat that many! So my tasks once we got home were: (a) pit a bazillion and half cherries, and (b) find a bunch of recipes that use cherries and apricots. I found a couple, and half-a-bazillion cherries are now in the freezer, along with half-a-ton of apricots. Another half-ton apricots await transport to the office tomorrow to give to colleagues who also probably got 6 tons of fruit from their parents’ dachas over the weekend. But we also have one awesome-looking cherry cake (which is hands-off for the time being) and a cherry-apricot crisp which has made my husband fall in love with me all over again. Whew!

The other big event of the weekend was my 20th high school reunion, which I obviously did not attend. I was torn, there were some folks I really would have liked to see, many I would happily never see again (high school was, by and far, not the happiest time of my life), but the final straw came down to timing. The majority picked dates when I wouldn’t already be in the US, and while I was prepared to fit it into a US trip, I wasn’t prepared to make a special US trip for it. Now that I read the posts and see the photos from last night, I’m a little bit regretful that I wasn’t there. Turns out there were a lot more people in high school that I liked than I remembered (why do we always remember the crappy stuff?). On the other hand, I am so happy to have spent my birthday weekend with my in-laws – it made them very happy, I know, and they are such kind and wonderful people, I am extremely grateful to have them in my life.

20 year high school reunion – seems like a time to pause and reflect. Yikes. I’m looking at classmates’ party photos and can’t recognize 2/3 of the people. Some folks take a minute and then I totally see who it is, and flashbacks start. Double yikes.

I’ve had three dreams in the past week about my childhood friend Kate. Normally I can easily trace a dream back to something going in my “real life”, and my first conclusion is that I’ve been thinking about this reunion and kinda wishing I could be there. But what’s weird is that I associate Kate more with grade school than with high school, as we were super-close-best-friends throughout most of grade school, but not so close in high school (and then roommates for awhile in college). I’m not sure who I associate most with high school, so maybe it makes sense that my sub-conscious is thinking about her since she was by and far the longest and probably most important friend of my childhood.

20 years. Good grief. I was such a lost teenager, lost for most of my 20’s too. Somehow when I hit my 30’s I finally felt “in my own.” I realized I was the age I was meant to be and the age I always wanted to be. I had confidence in myself, I took the chances I had always wanted to take, and I did things I never thought I was capable of doing. So my 20th high school reunion coincides with my 38th birthday (ack, forget I said that outloud!). This has been my decade, and even with two more years to go, I am sorry to see it wrapping up. My 30’s were even more than I could have hoped for. I love my life, I love my wonderful husband, and I want to spend decades and decades and decades more with him. My only regret, in my dark moments, are wishing that I had met him ages and ages ago so I could have even more years with him. But deep down I know I wasn’t ready 10 years ago to receive the love that he has to give me, and I certainly wasn’t ready to give the love that I have to give him now. But oh, how I long for eternity so that I could spend it with Igor!

It’s interesting to note how many of my classmates from Bishop Watterson Class of ’89 are divorced and starting or have started over. It was incredibly hard for me to tell my parents that I my first marriage was failing, being one of very very few in my extended Catholic family to get divorced, and one of the first, if not the first, among my peers. Most of us grew up in fairly devout Catholic families, with in-tact parents. I can remember only a handful of classmates with divorced parents, and as far as I can remember, none of them were Catholic. For the most part, I would say it is a very good thing that I and my peers didn’t feel compelled to stay in unhappy marriages, to spend our short lives in misery or at the least not as happy and fulfilled as we could be. I am sure our parents wonder what happened, though – how it was that they provided us with a good Catholic education and raised us in good Catholic families, and yet we turned out different. I believe it’s progress, but I wonder how many of our parents feel the same way.

Some days I wish very, very much that Igor could have met my mom, and that she could have met him. I hope she would have appreciated how much we adore each other and make each other happy. I know she would have been skeptical about me marrying a non-Catholic foreigner, and she would have been sad about my path taking me so far away from her and our hometown. While she always encouraged me to follow my own path, to be my own person, she at the same time always had very clear wishes of where that path would take me and what person I would be. I imagine I will always struggle with that dichotomy – the freedom she gave me while hoping I would choose what she wanted.

I’m really missing my mom today. Grandma’s birthday was yesterday, she died 3 months after mom. Gosh, I would love to be able to talk to them both again.

Great birthday

Thank you to everyone who wrote and called to wish me a happy birthday – it was really a great day!

I got home really late Thursday night from Russia, it was already practically Friday. At the stroke of midnight Igor produced a lovely bouquet of roses for me. So sweet! At the office my colleagues also surprised me with a beautiful bouquet of flowers, bright violet, but I don’t know what they are called. Really pretty.

The tradition here is that the birthday girl or boy prepares the party for colleagues and friends. Igor helped me out, ever the wonderful husband that he is, and brought a cake and 2 bottles of champagne to the office for me. We enjoyed relaxing and laughing for a bit, a nice break at the end of the week and worth doing no matter what the occasion! Several people had just returned from vacations and other trips, so there were plenty of hilarious travel stories to go around.

After work, Igor and I went to look at a couple of apartments. The real estate market has dropped so much that even apartments in Pechersk, where we desperately want to live again, have come into a more-or-less reasonable range. The first place had plenty of pluses, a few minuses, but the owners were pretty determined to stick to the inflated price they had in mind. It never fails to amaze me how many property owners here prefer to receive nothing instead of accepting a lower offer – as I understood it, the place had been empty for several months with no one willing to pay the price they wanted, but I guess they don’t need the money.

The second place we saw was a second visit for Igor. He had told me the day he first saw it “I found our apartment.” It just resonated with him, he felt at home there right away. I can’t say I had the same immediate feeling, but I definitely understood why he liked it. And he’s been so unhappy in the place that I picked last year, I want to make sure this time that we choose an apartment that he feels good about. Three big rooms, a nice size kitchen with gas stove, water heater, tall ceilings, brick building, in a courtyard so low street noise, enclosed balcony, well-insulated windows, second floor, in Pechersk, and a short walk from the metro – basically all we were hoping for! The previous tenants had kids who clearly put some wear on the place, though – spots from markers and stickers on the walls, furniture is “well used”, I would say. But that’s stuff we can fix or work around and generally deal with.

After a little bargaining, we closed the deal and will move in next week! The best part is that it is $450/month LESS than we are paying now, and our quality of life will be so much improved.

The great birthday wrapped up with a quiet dinner on the balcony with my wonderful husband, a delicious bottle of Georgian wine we bought in Tbilisi, and fireworks in three parts of the city that we could see. What else could you ask for?

Long day

I’m in Vladimir, Russia, this week. After the chaos at Boryspil last week, I made sure to be at the airport with plenty of time today, which meant getting up at 4:40 for my 8:20 flight. Taxi picked me up at 5:30, I was at Boryspil by 6:10, registration for my flight didn’t start until 6:30. It’s such a crap shoot at that airport!

It’s been a long day. It’s almost 1am local time, just an hour difference from Kyiv but I seem to have a new wind and can’t sleep. Things that I remembered today that I meant to write about earlier:

– Need to add “ice and easy access to getting it” to the list of things I love about the US, like ice machines in hotels and bags of ice at grocery stores. We spent days making ice for our margarita party this past weekend, which we used up in just a few short hours. Argh!

– Numerous crazy stories from Georgia. Such as…

I was all freaked out by the guy across the aisle from me on the Kyiv-Tbilisi flight, whose cell phone kept beeping throughout the flight. “Is your phone on?” I asked. “No, it’s off,” he said. “Strange, electronic devices rarely makes sounds when they are turned off.” He just stared at me.

As soon as the wheels of the plane touched the ground, two-thirds of the passengers jumped out of their seats and started getting their stuff from the overhead bins. The flight attendants asked a couple of times for them to sit down until the plane had stopped, but then they seemed to accept their defeat and just kept to themselves. I always wonder, where do those people think they will rush off to? The plane is sealed up tight, we’re still taxiing to the gate, yet it’s somehow crucially important that they get their stuff out and be ready to sprint out of the plane?

We hired a car and driver one day to take us to some cool historical sites just outside of Tbilisi. The driver stopped at a gas station on the way. There was a man sitting, maximum, six feet from the pump, smoking a cigarette. The driver got out, left the car running, and filled the tank. Igor and I looked at each. “I love you,” we said to each other, thinking these could very well be our last seconds on earth. We didn’t explode, thankfully, and Igor commented that he understands now that cell phones in airplanes is really nothing to these people.

When I departed from Batumi a week later, a woman got on the plane at the last moment and flopped down into the first available seat, which happened to be across from me. She buckled in as we pulled away from the gate. She starting searching through her purse, clearing becoming increasingly agitated. As we taxied to the runway, she unbuckled, stood up and took her luggage out of the overhead bin. She searched it as we pulled onto the runway, put it back, sat down again and searched her purse again. As the wheels lifted from the ground, she pulled out her cell phone, turned it on and dialed a number. I nearly had a heart attack.

“I can’t believe you are doing that”, I said to her. “I understand you’ve lost something, but it’s a question of safety.”
“Oh, calm down girl. I’ll just be quick.”
“And we’ll all die quickly.” (My imagination runs wild in a situation like this – all those unexplained plane crashes, were they because everyone on a plane turned on their phones?)
“I forgot my mobile phone in the airport,” she said, as if that justified everything.
“Your phone is more important than the lives of the people on this plane?”
Clearly she thought so.

As we ascended over the Black Sea, she called someone to tell them she’d forgotten her phone. I was contemplating calling my husband to tell him I love him.

People in this part of the world have a strange relationship to rules. I guess they would say the same about Americans, that we take them much too seriously. But I’m American and yes, dammit, I take my rules seriously, especially the ones that I understand to be about my safety and the safety of those around me. Do I think it’s absurd that in most of the US it is OK to operate a multi-ton motor vehicle after a couple of beers but it is not OK to walk in a park with an open alcholic beverage in your hand? Yeah, I do (how much damage can you do walking, for Pete’s sake?). Do I think there is logic to traffic rules? Hell yeah. I guess I understand somewhat risking your own life, and I recognize that some people (many?) don’t care about the lives of strangers around them. But driving like a maniac with your kids in the car, or standing up in a taxiing airplace with your baby in your arms, that I will just never understand. Even if you care for no other life around, how can you not care for the life of your child?

I’ve philosophized over this question with many an ex-pat. I do believe the insane rush to get your carry-on out and be first ready to exit the plane comes from the the mentality towards lines here, which is one of the biggest legacies of the Soviet Union (close but still not equal to the insane need to have any and all documents stamped; I swear one of these days I’m buying a unicorn stamp for all official business!).

I’ve concluded that if they don’t die from it the first time, they decide it’s OK to do all the time. There are many flaws to this theory, but it’s the only way I can rationalize the behavior.

48 hours in Kyiv

I got back from Georgia on Friday afternoon, and I leave Monday morning for another workshop in Russia. Yikes! Thank goodness for the heat – my laundry dried quick enough for a re-pack for the next trip.

We had a great weekend in Tbilisi last week, and then I had a good workshop in Batumi. The only bummer was that it rained cats and dogs every single day and evening! And since the big attraction to having the workshop in Batumi was the Black Sea, it was disappointing that we couldn’t swim. One colleague braved it during a brief break in the rain, but the water was so rough, he didn’t try for long.

A US Navy GM destroyer arrived in Batumi along with us for training exercises with the Georgian Coast Guard. Turned out they ate at the same restaurant as us one evening. Our waitress disappeared for a LONG time, and when our Georgian colleague finally found here, he asked what was going on, why had she abandoned us.

Waitress: “We have Americans here in the other hall.”
Georgi: “We have Americans too!”
Waitress: “Well, these are Black Americans.”

We all had a good chuckle, and we agreed that we didn’t mind at all that we’d been ignored for a bit if that was her excuse – my, how times have changed!

My suitcase was full of fabulous Georgian wine on the return trip, plus a couple bottles of chacha, a drink the Georgians like to compare to grappa, but I think it’s more like turpentine. Very, very potent. And a perfect gift for my in-laws, who love that kind of stuff. One bottle of wine broke in my suitcase, though, which came to my attention when I noticed the trail of red liquid following me through the airport terminal. Turned out to be the decorative ceramic bottle that I bought solely because I liked the bottle. I’m not sure if the wine was any good or not, but I was bummed to lose the pretty bottle. And of course laundry was interesting. Thank goodness nothing valuable was destroyed!

It’s been hot as Hades in Kyiv, and we were excited to finally host a party on our big balcony – margarita night! Igor and I cooked all day, and had some of that delicious Georgian wine to keep us happy and motivated. Friends arrived, I had two margaritas, laid down on the couch for a sec, and next thing I know, I wake up and the guests were long gone! I was most definitely not the “hostess with the mostest” last night. I guess the booze, heat and travel just caught up with me and I was out for the count. I was up long for a few minutes, thought about cleaning up and putting the leftovers away, but was still utterly exhausted and fell dead asleep again. Poor Igor was up until 2:30 cleaning up. I swear, I don’t deserve his love! He was so nice about it, though, and we had a good laugh this morning. Boy, do I ever owe him for this one.

Tomorrow is an early start. After the last disaster at Boryspil, I’m not taking any risks and will head out at an ungodly early hour. Looks like the weather is cooler around Moscow than it’s been in Kyiv – that’s a relief!

New record

It was a new record for total and utter chaos yesterday at Boryspil airport. It’s always a bit of a madhouse there, but yesterday was really quite impressive. Two counters for something like 6 or 7 flights to check in- Tbilisi, Bangkok, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Copenhagen and others. Everybody was freaking out, the poor ladies were doing their best, I’m sure, but passengers were yelling at them to work faster (which just ALWAYS makes someone want to work faster, right?). We were in line for registration for over an hour, finally just 2 or 3 people away from our turn, when 2 obnoxious men pushed their way to the front and wanted to ditch everyone because they were late. Very brave move, I thought- that crowd was pretty dang ready to go ballistic on somebody. I pointed out that we were ALL late, and Igor told them to get back to their place in line. (Turned out they were on the same flight as us, so definitely no more late than we were.)

Security noticed my little non-pointy scissors for my cross-stitch (which have gone on something like 10 or 12 flights with me) and said they weren’t allowed, but didn’t take them away. Just told me to leave them in the terminal (which, of course, I did not).

Passport control went smoothly, we breezed through. Igor noticed two men being deported. I overhead a man ask that his passport NOT be stamped. What was that about, I wonder? I’ve heard of Americans doing that in Cuba, or someone who travels between Armenia and Azerbaijan not wanting a stamp, but no stamp in Ukraine was a new one for me.

I checked the screen, Gate 1. By the time we got there, our gate had changed. The ladies at Gate 1 told us to go to Gate 4. We stood in line but something didn’t look right. I went to check the screen again, and now we were changed to Gate 5. I stared to wonder if they really knew where our plane was.

We finally boarded, then spent an entire hour on the tarmack, suffocating in the stifling hot air of the cabin. Babies screeching, everyone melting. When we finally did take off (and the air conditioning kicked on, thank god!), the pilot came on the intercom to apologize for the delay, which was due “to lack of services at Boryspil airport”. Wow. And they want to host Euro 2012 here? They’ve got a LONG way to go.

On the plus side, the new entrance to the terminal is spiffy (although the improvement over the previous entrances is questionable). And the barricades were arranged in one of the most logical ways I’ve ever seen in the parking lot at Boryspil (the traffic pattern is arranged differently every single time I go there).

We had a great evening in Tbilisi. We’re staying in a kind of bed-and-breakfast right in the center of town. A character of an old lady has almost an entire floor of an old historical building, and she rents out five or six rooms. At some point in time, the large rooms were renovated to each include a bathroom. The walls are covered with her own paintings (“I’m no artist, it’s just my hobby”). You could probably get a second floor in here, the ceilings are so high. When I called to make the reservation, she told me “У вас входит бракфаст”, which cracked me up (4 words in Russia, 1 in heavily-accented English, translation: breakfast (the word she said in English) is included).

We were both a bit irritable after the flight (and a loooonnngg wait for luggage in Tbilisi), but some wine and hatchipuri improved moods pretty quickly. Then a wonderful meal with friends at a cool outdoor restaurant along the river. So much for losing those American pounds!

Delicious rain

It’s been raining all evening in Kyiv, a gentle, delicious-smelling rain with a little bit of thunder and lighting. A lovely summer rain.

The vegetable soup on the stove also smells delicious. We seem to have gone overboard at the market this past weekend, all the gorgeous fresh veggies were just too irresistible! But it turns out there is a limit to how much salad even I can eat, and I couldn’t bare to think of all that food going to waste. So I’m making veggie soup, which seems like a winter dish to me, so maybe I’ll freeze it and save it until January when I’ll be dreaming of fresh veggies.

Good news of the day: Delta gave me unexpected bonus miles and now it’s quite possible I’ll achieve Gold Medallion status this year. Not really sure what that will get me – bragging rights at the least, I guess.

I finished watching the series Arrested Development. Lord, what a hilarious show. Such a pity it only had 3 seasons! I’m watching Monk now. Also great, but in a different way. I’m reading pulp fiction and watching less-than-intellectual American TV programs. Man, this is not like me at all! I usually love to read and watch something educational (yes, I’m a dork), but lately I just want to veg in the evenings.

We’re going to Tbilisi this weekend. I’ve got a workshop next week in Georgia, and I talked Igor into going a few days early with me since he’s never been to Tbilisi. Yeah!

Happy Independence Day!

We had a great 4th of July here in Kyiv. Since it actually fell on a Saturday this year, we got to celebrate the great day on the actual day even!

We loaded up the car with friends and tons of food, met up with some other friends in their car, and proceeded to drive back and forth across Kyiv for a couple hours. That wasn’t the fun part, believe me, but it took us awhile to find an acceptable spot for our cookout. The folks in the other car wanted to go to a beach along the Dnipro River in the southwest part of Kyiv, but when we got there we were all disappointed and disgusted with the mounds of trash everywhere. Igor put it rather mildly – “not appetizing.” So we headed back across town to the forests on the northeast side of Kyiv. The spot was perfect – no one else seen or heard, almost no trash, and the added fun of getting to test our Toyota 4-Runner off road – woohoo!

The Americans cooked hamburgers, the Ukrainians cooked shashlik. Everyone ate the too-die-for brownies that Eilene made (although I noticed only the Americans were excited about the also too-die-for peanut butter cookies). We grilled fish and veggies. We had salads. And of course beer, wine, juices and other drinks galore. We played frisbee. We laughed until our sides hurt watching Bazooka the dog try to bury her stick somewhere close to China.

We dragged ourselves home late in the evening, tired and content. It was a really great day, and best of all that we could spend it with friends.

Is it better over there?

That’s the question I get asked frequently from both sides of the pond. Actually, Ukrainians usually say “It’s better in America, right?” and Americans often ask “What do you miss about living in America?”, but the general idea is an interest in what is different between life in the US and in Ukraine (or at least that’s how I choose to interpret those questions).

I always answer the Ukrainian question by saying “Some things are better in Ukraine, some are better in the US”, which opens the door for me to comment on a few of the areas where the average Ukrainian could contribute to improving society: litter, reckless and dangerous driving, smoking, etc. Being in the US for a month recently, I was asked several times about what I like better about life in Ukraine, and I talked about the delicious, truly organic food, the safety, the freedom. While it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more regulations in some areas (consumer protection, for example), I don’t get a 12-inch long receipt from a Ukrainian store with extensive warnings that are common sense and detailed outlines of how they are NOT liable for anything at all. I think we’ve gone off the deep end in the US trying to shirk all responsibility for anything and everything. Don’t get me wrong, Ukrainians don’t like to take responsibility either, that seems to be human nature. But at least they haven’t codified it in the law and the lawyers haven’t created a whole industry of trying to make someone else pay for the fact I spilled my hot coffee or I don’t know how to properly use a toothbrush.

Anyway, before I digress any further, I thought I’d share the non-comprehensive lists of things Igor and I love in both countries. We’ll keep adding to it as things come to my mind, and please feel free to leave comments about what you love too! (And if anyone knows how to insert a table or columns in a WordPress post so these can be side-by-side lists, please email me.)

United States

laundry – how awesome is it that your clothes can be washed and dried in an hour?

roads – Eishenhower was a genius for building the interstate highway system

shopping – the sales are just fabulous, warehouse and outlet stores rock!

national parks – truly truly something all Americans can be proud of. It’s dumb luck that so many stunning places are located within our borders, but it’s brilliant that we protect and preserve them. I happily pay taxes so places like the Grand Canyon National Park can exist.

air conditioning, and the lack of fear of using it

open car windows

no smoking laws

lack of litter, people’s attitude towards nature (keeping it clean, etc)

friendly people

steaks (OK, that one is all Igor)

ice, and easy access to it (grocery stores, hotel ice machines, etc)

Ukraine

public transportation – you can get just about anywhere for a very reasonable price

natural foods – it doesn’t get better than a babushka’s fresh garden delights

beer – damn good beer. And there is something just awesome about drinking a nice cold beer while walking through the park on a hot summer day.

forest mushrooms – they get their own line, they are so damn good

festivals – there is one pretty much every week in Kyiv throughout the summer, and all over the country too.

fireworks – there’s always an occasion for a salut! Two, three times a week in Kyiv, year-round

holidays- can’t have too many of them

Old New Year’s – see above

the way drivers say “thank you” on the road by flashing their hazards 2-3 times

free luggage carts at Boryspil airport

Elusive sleep

We went jogging last night on the track near our apartment. The goals? (A) keep me from falling asleep on the couch at 6pm; (B) wear me out so I would sleep through the night; and (C) start to tackle the extra “luggage” we brought back with us from the US.

Definite success with goal #1: I was up until the whoppingly late hour of 9:00 pm. Slept until 4:30 am, which is progress but I still wouldn’t call it total success. Goal C will take a lot more than one evening’s jog to accomplish, but we started on it at least.

Considering the primary aerobic activity of my month in the US was driving from one eating establishment to another, and my weight training involved the serious exercises of lifting a full fork or glass to my mouth, I was darn impressed that I pulled off 5 running laps and 1 walking lap at the track. We don’t know the distance- Igor guessed 300-350 meters, I guessed 250 (but I have absolutely no metric sense, so he’s probably closer), I may have run anywhere from 1.25 kilometers to 1.75. Whatever the distance, it’s both pathetic (for a person who used to easily run 5K) and impressive (for the person I am now).

And today I’ve managed to stay up until 11:00. Would it be too much to hope I could sleep until 6 am?

It’s been beautiful in Kyiv, warm and sunny, just the way summer ought to be. And the long, long days are in full stride – it was sunny when I woke up at 4:30 this morning, and there was still a bit of sunlight at 10:00 pm. Gosh, I just love it!

We are missing Pepette immensely. The apartment just doesn’t feel right without her. She was with me almost all of the time I’ve lived in Ukraine. And it just feels nice to have a pet in the house. Igor is warming to the idea of getting a new pet, although he’s not completely ready. That’s OK, I’m not completely ready either. But I know it will be good when do get a new cat.