Wednesday March 26

Greetings from Ukraine,

No further news regarding our SDA appointment. Not all that surprising since we just "officially" applied yesterday. Our facilitator did say that he is going to be insistent with the SDA regarding the referrals. If there are no files to be shown other than the usual referrals of sickly invalids, then he wants our appointment postponed. While we're going antsy with waiting for a new appointment, we would rather wait then be sent on another wild goose chase.

We did our morning ritual of going to St. Michael Church, offering a prayer(s), lighting a candle(s), and then giving money to the poor on our way out. We did stop into the gift shop and saw some beautiful, hand painted religious icons. Their price tags reflected their quality and ranged from $100 to $200. There were some smaller ones behind a glass display that prevented me from checking out their price; I would guess their prices at somewhere around the $50 mark. For hand painted icons thats actually not a bad price. They were beautiful but in addition to our promise to cut back on expenditures, we simply don't have the luggage space for more things. Needless to say, Shirl and I did not purchase anything. We bought some of our own icons from home for our apartment and earlier in our trip, we did purchase a small icon during our first stay in Kiev a few weeks ago. But that icon is SMALL. Small enough to fit into my jacket pocket if it can't fit into our suitcases.

For the fun of it, Shirley composed a list of the 10 things that we miss most from home and asked me to put them in the blog. In backwards order, they are...

10. Food variety. If you're cooking for yourselves, then get used to eating the same thing day after day. Grocery stores often run out of one product or another. For several days, no eggs. The next several days, no meat. The next several days, no something else. And so on, and so on...

9. Free bags at the grocery store. All grocery stores have a bring-your-own-bag policy. If you don't have any bags, sure they'll let you use theirs. For a fee.

8. Yukon. We MISS our 70LB pup!! Our house/dog sitter back home says that Yukon spends a lot of hours staring out of the windows at the front of the house. Guess he misses us too. He gets lots of hugs at our homecoming!!

7. Ice Cubes. What is it about this place and ice cubes? They just aren't any anywhere. All drinks at restaurants are served lukewarm. And I don't care who says what, lukewarm diet coke is gross. You can ask for ice in your drink at a restaurant if you don't mind the locals looking at you like YOU are the freak.

6. Peanut Butter. There are plenty of peanuts, but we've yet to see peanut butter anywhere. And we've looked for it at some pretty sizeable supermarkets in downtown Kiev.

5. Cooking shows. I mean real cooking shows where the chefs actually move around in the kitchen and show you what they're cooking and how they're cooking it. Ukrainian cooking shows are more like a group of women sitting around a table, reading off a list of ingredients for a recipe. Doesn't exactly get you psyched for whatever it is they're cooking today.

4. Coffee mugs. Seems like the coffee here is served in these very small tea cups. They more resemble glorified shot glasses than something to drink coffee from. At 8am I want COFFEE!! If I can't have it in a nice size mug then just bring me the whole urn!!

3. Clothes dryers. They don't exist in this country. Ukrainians wash their clothes in washing machines that leave the clothes soaking wet due to a pretty worthless spin cycle. Then they hang the clothes out to dry. At this time of the year there is no point in hanging them outside. We now have a living room full of drying clothes.

2. Soft towels. Towels that are hung to dry after being washed wind up feeling more like cardboard than towels.

and the final thing that we miss is.....(drum roll please)....

1. Toilet paper. I mean real toilet paper. TP here more resembles the newsprint we used to color on in grade school. And if being like newsprint isn't bad enough, you at least have to remember to carry around your own supply of newsprint wherever you go. Whether its a bathroom in a restaurant, a Church, an apartment, etc etc., chances are the bathroom is out of TP.


Personally I was never much of a David Letterman fan. But his format does well to prove the point.

Hope all is well. God bless....



Steve