Thursday March 27

Greetings from Ukraine,


Once again there is no additional word regarding our next appointment. As I've said in my posts all week, it would surprise me if we got an appointment this week. While we remain hopeful day by day, my prediction is that a 3rd appointment will occur sometime during the 2nd half of next week. I just hope that the selection of referrals is an improvement.


Shirley is nearly halfway through her book "The Stand" by Stephen King. That is a very thick book. But when people have a lot of time to kill, no book is too thick!


During our daily walk to the St. Michael Church today we got hit with a snow squall. I haven't seen a good snow squall since living in Boston nearly 10 years ago. Snow squalls are pretty interesting; going from sunny to whiteout then back to sunny again in only a matter of minutes. There were groups of kids at the Church on what looked like some type of a field trip. When the squall hit the kids used the snowstorm to "escape" from their teachers and run amok. The teachers had to spend some time after the squall rounding up the escapees. Kids will be kids.


We've been running low on groceries and have yet to find anything resembling a decent grocery store near our new apartment. The closest store is some kind of a liquor store that also sells a limited supply of foodstuffs at an inflated price. Shirley figured that she'd had enough and decided to trek to the grocery store near our former apartment. Trust me, that is one heckuva walk from here. First of all she was sick of the rudeness of these liquor store people and besides, she is going stir crazy and wanting to stretch her legs. It took her some time but she finally returned with a small stock of groceries that should carry us through the weekend.



One "neccessity" that we've been missing out on is cereal. Shirley is a big cereal lover. After some searching, she came across this Russian version of Fruit Loops. Here in Ukraine these kinds of cold cereals are somewhat pricier, at least compared to prices of the other more native foods. This is a small box and is probably good for 4 or 5 bowls of cereal.



Ukrainians eat a lot of oatmeal and this small package to the right is what oatmeal looks like here. This package cost less than $1.20 and God only knows how many bowls of oatmeal we'll get out of it. We have yet to finish our first bag of oatmeal from when we first got to Kiev a few weeks ago. It is so easy to prepare; it takes two minutes to fix a bowl of oatmeal with chopped bananas.



Shirley and I eat a lot of tuna fish at home. We were relieved to see that tuna is plentiful in Ukrainian stores. These are what cans of tuna fish look like here. Shirley bought these some time ago so don't even ask me the price. She did say that it was very reasonable. Just like in English the word "Tuna" begins with the letter "T". But don't ask me to even try pronouncing it.







Thats all for now. As I said, there is nothing new happening her except trying to be domestic and keeping sane. As always, thanks for the comments and the emails.


Steve