Not much to add to this

http://kyivscoop.blogspot.com/2010/04/black-sea-fleet-vote-know-thy-heroes.html

More warm fuzzies

The weather is just too beautiful to keep me down this weekend!  And there are so many things that made me smile this week.

My dear friends Petya and Marina have been admitted to graduate programs in the US! And not just any old program at any old school in any old state, but the Liquid Crystals Institute at Kent State University in the grand state of Ohio!  Conventional liquid crystal displays were invented in LCI. I really have no idea what that means, but the website says:

“Chances are good that the cell phone, music player, or GPS you may have in your pocket, the television you last watched, and perhaps even the computer screen on which you might be reading this message, were all made with technology developed here at Kent.”

Congratulations Petya and Marina! I’m looking forward to visiting you in Ohio next year!

Tahini, pita bread, whole wheat tortillas and sharp cheddar cheese from the Commissary – cheese that is not white! Woohoo!

Chilean wine on sale for 25UAH at Good Wine – almost as good as Two Buck Chuck!

A vendor at the farmer’s market who finally understands that an avocado should not be as hard as a baseball. (Now if only I could find someone who understands that celery should not have the tastes and texture of rope!)

My boys, Igor and Ziggy, who make me laugh and smile every day.

Glee – how the heck was I missing this? Why didn’t anybody tell me it’s set in Lima, Ohio?!  Holy cow, what a FABULOUS show! 

And once again I am so grateful for the intertubes, which not only allow me to watch fun programs like Glee but also keep in touch with family and friends all over the world.

Igor’s done prepping the meat, fish and veggies for our shashlik (like shish kebabs) outing tomorrow, so my turn to take over the kitchen and work on the rest of the menu. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

Spring

Oh, how I love this city in the spring. It’s like a totally different world – how can this beautiful, bright, lush city be the same one of a few months ago during the awful, awful winter? However it happens, thank goodness it does because this is part of what keeps me here. The beautiful spring in Kyiv!

And the best part is the week of May holidays. Bookended with May Day (or Labor Day) on the 1st and Victory Day on the 9th, schools have spring break, many offices close and most folks take the week off and get out of town. And I love Kyiv even more when most of the people are gone. 🙂 No traffic jams, no cars parked anywhere and everywhere (well, a lot less, at least), and silence from the apartment above us instead of the usual obnoxious blaring heavy metal.

Kyivans head outdoors as soon as the weather turns nice and this weekend was no different. We took a long, leisurely walk through our favorite Marinsky Park, and saw the first blooms on a chestnut tree! Another couple of days and the entire city will be decorated!

We stopped at the market on the way home. It’s still early, but there are a few “first crop” veggies popping up and we couldn’t resist. Lettuce is slowly breaking into the Ukrainian food market, with lovely bunches of fresh-picked red- and green-leaf lettuce. There was even arugula, which Igor had never had before. And life was further enhanced this week with the addition of tahini and pita bread in the Embassy’s Commissary – hummus, here we come!

After a lovely loooonnnggg swim (alone in the pool, I might add!) we feasted on our fresh veggie pita sandwiches last night. Yum!

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I’ve realized stupid Facebook is killing my blogging. Not that I post much to Facebook, either, but for some reason I’ve become inclined to post a 7-10 word status update instead of a 7-10 sentence blog post. I’m going to try to work on that. There are too many good friends who have been following me on my blogs for years, and I hate to lose that connection between us (since I’m still terrible about keeping up by email).

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In other news, Igor is so thoroughly, immensely, deeply disgusted with President Yanukovych, he actually told me he wouldn’t mind now moving to the US. This from the man who wouldn’t start dating me until I understood that he was Ukrainian and would always want to live in Ukraine. Of course, that was less than a year after the Orange Revolution, when everyone was still bright-eyed and bushy tailed, full of optimism and hope for what the future held. That optimism and hope slowly faded over the next four years, and seems to have left Igor completely now. He was not a fan of Yanukovych to start with, but the extension of the lease for the Russian naval base in Crimea makes him so angry he can hardly see straight. And the utter idiocy of the Ukrainian parliamentarians is just plain embarrassing – there’s really no other way to describe them. Well, there are other ways but it hardly seems worth spending your time and energy doing so. There’s enough discussion and commentary out in the blogosphere about them right now, I don’t feel like repeating it all here.

I was in Baku last week when the egg-throwing, smoke-bombing farce of governing process took place. I turned on the TV Wednesday morning and caught the last 10 seconds or so of a BBC report, which showed people demonstrating in the streets. My first reaction was to be nervous, even a bit afraid, wondering what was happening in Kyiv, if people were picketing or rioting. Then I was a bit excited, proud even, that Ukrainians were standing up again for themselves, protesting a bogus government action that the majority of citizens are adamantly opposed to. But no, it was a scence from the day before, outside the Verkhovna Rada, when a small group was making some noise while the deputies inside were having fist fights.

My favorite part of the pseudo-democracy in Ukraine is that there were fewer parlaimentarians actually in the building than votes were cast on this extremely controversial issue. A few parlaimentarians who “voted” weren’t even in the country. They have some loophole here that allows other party members to cast the ballot for their absentee colleagues. I suppose we should be impressed that any of them bother to show up at all. Could one guy be appointed to report every day and do everyone’s work for them?

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Well, I don’t want to end on a sour note on such a beautiful day. The sky is so blue, the trees are so green. It’s a long holiday weekend and we’re going to the forest tomorrow with friends for a picnic. Yeah!

Huh?

Is it just me, or does this ad somehow not understand the use of the word “complimentary”? For a fee, you can get something – how is that complimentary?

Introducing Delta Sky Club Access for Cardmembers with a Gold or Platinum Delta SkyMiles Credit Card from American Express.

For just $25 per visit, you can enjoy complimentary:

• Snacks and beverages
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