Sunday March 30th - Spring forward

Happy Daylight Savings Time,


Early on today we received a telephone call from our facilitator saying that he wanted to meet with us for lunch. We were a little hesitant – because of our dwindling resources we had made a pact with ourselves to eat out less and eat in more - but our facilitator sounded psyched so we went for it anyway. The restaurant that we went to was called “Uncle Sam’s” and as if you couldn’t tell by the name, they also served American food. Nice, thick burgers and homemade onion rings emerged from their kitchen although everything was definitely on the pricey side. It's still "therapeutic" for us to eat American; good morale booster and neurosis retardent. We came back to our apartment in better spirits that we've been in a long time.


You could say that there is quite a bit of action in this part of Kiev; between all of the shops, restaurants, nightclubs, casinos, etc., it is very busy around our apartment. So for the entertainment section of today’s post I thought that I’d upload some pictures of our “neighborhood”. This first pic is of that Italian Restaurant that Shirley and I went to the other day. Their menus were in either Russian or Italian so we chose to give the Italian menus a shot. Because there are so many Italian words that we’ve incorporated into the English language, we were surprised at how easy it was to understand the Italian menu. We did want to order mushroom pizza but weren’t sure how to say “mushrooms” in Italian. There was one menu selection that read something like “pizza con funghi”. That was a little unnerving; did “funghi” mean mushrooms or something scary? We never thought that we'd need an Italian-English dictionary in Ukraine and our waitress could barely speak English so there was no point in even asking her. Rather than take a chance that we'd order pizza cooked with something God-awful, we opted for pepperoni pizza. That brought forward another potential problem; back in Khmelnytsky we learned the hard way that ordering "pepperoni pizza" could get you a pizza topped with something that looked like banana peppers. “Pizza con salami” sounded like a safe bet. So pizza con salami was Thursday night’s dinner. It was pretty tasty too!!



In an earlier post I also told you about the nearby store called “Mega Market”. Its the closest thing that Ukraine has to a Walmart. There is a prepay parking lot that is part of the store property and the store itself takes up most of a city block and has two floors. Floor one is a huge grocery store full of food; the perfect place to go when the cupboard needs to be stocked. Floor two has most everything else that you can find in a Walmart. Shirley and I were in dire need of a few things. Several pairs of our socks had gotten torn apart after all of the walking that we’ve been doing for the past several weeks. We were also tired of drinking coffee and tea in these little tea cups that resembled glorified shot glasses. So HUGE coffee mugs were also on the shopping list. There was also the normal food and water supplies that we’ve been going through a few times a week. It was a nice, fun trip of exploration as well as replenishment. Anyway, here is a pic of the side of the Mega Market at the parking entrance. It was taken right after we raided the place. If you look carefully you can see Shirley hanging out under the rightmost underpass.





There is an opera house less than a 10 minutes by foot from our apartment. Our landlord complained that their ticket prices are outrageous. By “outrageous” he made us think of Opera prices in the States. I believe opera tickets in New York City starts at about $100 (of course it depends on which opera) so we figured that they must be even pricier here. But when Shirley checked out their prices online, she found tickets to be a very doable $5 to $25 each (dependng on the seats). “Outrageous”? Compared to what? A matinee? Anyway, here is a pic of the "Opereta". It is a beautiful building. If possible we would like to see a show although since we may be leaving this apartment around Tuesday or Wednesday, we may not get the chance. And if our next referral is successful, then next month we'll be back to Kiev with a kid(s) in tow. In which case it will be no way Jose to an opera.





Well folks, that's all for today. Thanks again for all of the encouraging comments and emails. I can't say it enough; hearing from people at home means the world to Shirley and I. God bless...