The numbers

7 days, 5 flights, 3 cities, -30C. Too cold and too busy to do any siteseeing. Did visit the new church in Yekaterinburg built on the spot where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were shot 92 years ago. Pics will be posted later.

Ready to be home. Last battle is with Moscow traffic and then one more flight to Kyiv! Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

Presidential Elections

My photos from the election weekend are up.

And there are some other scenes from Cherkasy as well.

We came across an ice sculpture competition

 

And some cool old murals in a hospital building. There was a nice juxtaposition of Lenin on one wall, and Bohdan Khmelnytsky on the opposite wall.

And the winner is…

Yuliya Tymoshenko. At least at the pollong station where we watched
the ballot count. Viktor Yanukovich in close second, Tihipko third,
Yatsenyuk a distant fouth, Yushchenko an even farther fifth.

Been a long yet interesting day. Can’t say we saw any blatan fraud,
although there some odd things in a couple of places. Let’s hope
things went as smoothly and honestly in the rest of the country. If
so, looks like Round 2 will be a tough one.

Election Day

Today is the first round of presidential elections in Ukraine. Most
analysts expect none of the 14 or so candidates will garner enough
votes to clearly win today, so a second, run-off round is already
anticipated in early February.

I’m in Cherkassy volunteering as an international election observer
with the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). Part of our
team arrived here Friday morning, the rest of us Saturday morning.

We meet with parties’ and candidates’ local headquarters, the city and
oblast government, and visited some polling stations to observe the
set-up.

Cherkassy isn’t expected to be a particularly scandalous or
troublesome area, but certainly won’t be free of shenanigans. Plenty
of questionable activity witnessed on Saturday already- some perhaps
honest mistakes due to poor training for election workers, or not
understanding the convoluted and sometomes contradictory election law;
other times seems like pretty clear set-up for fraud. Like not
delivering all the ballots to a polling station- someone probably held
them back for ballot box stuffing.

It’s 7 am and we’re off to the opening of a polling station.

Happy Election Day Ukraine! I wish you lots of luck putting democracy to work.

Feeling humble

I was about to write a whiny post about how it’s snowing again in Kyiv and it’s such a mess here, and then a report came on BBC World Service about the devastation in Haiti.

I am thankful for this beautiful snowy day. I am thankful I have a warm home. I am thankful for all the many, many blessings in my life.

My friend Jayne has an excellent post about how we can help people in Haiti, and those suffering in other disasters around the world. I won’t repeat it all here, but please make a donation to organizations like Mercy Corps and Red Cross, who have the skilled personnel trained to provide the necessary assistance in emergency situations. I contributed to both today.

It’s a girl!

My brother did some streaming video thing at the doctor’s office this week when his wife had an ultrasound. Those in a closer time zone and/or able to stay up until ungodly hours of the night in other parts of the world got to watch it live and in action. Those of us who slept through it watched it this morning. It was still soooo exciting!

It’s a girl! Woohoo!

Congratulations Scott and Angela! Can’t wait to meet her in June.

Snowwoman

Finally got the snowwoman photos off my phone and onto Flickr.

I did her hair.

Merry Christmas!

Today is Christmas in the Orthodox Christian world. We celebrated with Igor’s family, the way we celebrate most holidays – with a beautiful table full of delicious goodies. Christmas Eve dinner is, as his family likes to say, the best night of the year for me: 11 vegan dishes plus fish. I admit, I do enjoy the rare occasion when I sit down to a table and am able to enjoy everything on it!

Getting to Korosten yesterday was a bit harrowing. It was snowing (again!), with strong winds. And this on top of the already several feet of snow and thick ice covering Kyiv. It’s been beautiful to look at, but very difficult to get around. Some scenes from our apartment windows earlier this week:

Our own car has been parked for several weeks and is thoroughly buried under a ton of snow.

As we waited for the Korosten marshrutka (minibus) yesterday afternoon, I got increasingly nervous as I watched other buses and cars skid around the ice-covered parking lot. I finally told Igor I was kind of nervous to risk the 150 km trip in that weather, but when a big, sturdy-looking bus pulled up instead of the usual smaller marshrutka, driven by a former co-worker and old buddy of Igor’s, we decided it was safe. We made it to Korosten with no problems, thankfully, and it took just a bit longer than usual, but I didn’t mind at all! It was actually refreshing to be with a careful driver concerned about safety, for a change.

This morning Igor was given the fun task of shoveling the walkways around the house. He was out there a really long time, while his mom finished preparing the big Christmas meal and I set the table and helped her. I finally looked outside to see if he’d collapsed or something, and he was making a snowman! Well, here it’s called a snow-woman. The snow was just right, and there was plenty of it!

I’ve been horsing around for an hour trying to get the photos of the snowwoman off my blackberry to upload on my Flickr account. Guess I’ll have to share them later.

Despite being quite portly, I don’t think she’ll last long – we had temps above freezing today! Woohoo! It was a slushy mess coming back to our apartment, but the slightly damp feet seem much better than falling down on the ice a hundred times, like I’ve been doing all week. It will take awhile for all this snow and ice to melt, if the temps stay on the + side long enough, that is.

The other good news this week is that my brother the hero restored my old blog, MoldovAnn. Yeah! Although I’m not posting to it anymore, I didn’t want to lose the five years of posts stored there. And I know there are a lot of links out there on the intertubes to my Chornobyl posts. The site was down for a couple weeks while we tried to import into this new one. It’s not surprising that I couldn’t figure out how to import, but I felt a little better when even Scott had trouble with it – it wasn’t just me! Whatever magic he worked, I really appreciate it! I was missing the site, as weird as that may sound. I felt like an old friend had disappeared. Five years of posts, the record of so much change, so many adventures, so many people and events. I am soooo glad my old friend is back!  And Scott made it even better – he cleaned out all the spam that had overwhelmed the admin side of the site and I discovered there were a bunch of really interesting comments on lots of posts! And here I thought I was the only one reading my blog. 🙂

Well, we’ve got one more holiday to go this season, Old New Year, my personal favorite just ’cause it sounds so wacky. It’s a relaxing holiday, one to spend with friends being silly. A nice way to end the lovely, long and sometimes stressful holiday season in Ukraine.

Happy New Year!

So much for the idea that an easier way to blog would help me blog more. 🙂

We’ve been busy, having a great holiday season. We spent a few days in Istanbul, which was really incredible. I’m still trying to sort through our photos and impressions so I can put together a post.

We had friends over for US Christmas (Dec 25), and had homemade eggnog. Wow. It. was. awesome. But also one of those things that really better if you don’t know how it’s made. Igor, ever anxious to try something new in the kitchen, watched with increasing horror as I mixed everything together, and was convinced it would another of my weird and disgusting “for American tastes” flavors (like peanut butter and mint chocolate). You really wouldn’t expect that all those ingredients would combine to make something so delicious (and killer!). Igor was thoroughly impressed.

New Year’s Eve, the big holiday of the season here, was celebrated in Korosten as usual. We had a nice time, as always. Igor always jokes that I fall asleep with the chickens, and it’s true that midnight is not a time of day I frequently see. But I made it! Hard to believe it is 2010. What a decade the “aught’s” were.