Saturday April 5 - the weekend is here

Greetings from Kiev,



Yesterday at about 7pm our facilitator came to our apartment to fill us in on an earlier meeting that he had with the SDA. He also added that on Monday at about noon we're to go to the SDA for a meeting regarding our case. Please note that this is NOT an appointment, only a meeting. There will therefore be no news to report until Monday afternoon at the earliest regarding an appointment. Possibly longer, depending on how quickly the SDA moves.


For whom it may concern - my birthday pizza dinner was nice last night. We found a small pizzeria near the apartment. We had eaten at this particular pizza chain before back when we were in Khmelnytsky around March 21st for our 2nd appointment. So we knew that they had decent pizza and were very reasonable priced. We couldn't decide if we wanted pizza with salami or pizza with "fungh" (mushrooms). So we opted for one of each. It cost about $7 for both. There was no way that Shirley and I could eat both pizzas. Of course that meant plenty of leftovers. Looks like we will be eating my birthday dinner throughout the weekend, or at least through today.



As chaotic as the traffic is in Kiev, it becomes exponentially worse during rush hour which is when we headed home from dinner. The main streets are so clogged; they become essentially parking lots. And don't even try getting out of a side street onto a main street because even when the lights change, there is still traffic blocking the intersection. I simply had to post a couple of pics from Kievian rush hour. When the green "walk" light is lit, it is still neccesary to step around cars blocking the intersection. If you look at the 2nd pic and find the green walk light, just above it you will see a number that I think said 36 (you may have to click on the pic to blow it up). That number is your countdown; you have that many seconds to cross the street. And when that green number gets to zero, you'd better be clear or you may wind up with tire tracks across your feet!





Leave it to my beautiful wife to surprise me with a birthday cake when we got back to the apartment. It was a delicious whipped cream walnut/almond combination - next to ice cream cake anything with nuts reigns supreme! It was a good thing that I had a decent amount of pizza for dinner. Even though I don't have a sweet-tooth, I am a nut for nuts and could have easily eaten the whole dessert by myself. What I loved even more was the price. The cost of the cake was about 8 hrivnas; about $1.60 for the whole thing (less than a cost of a slice of cake at this internet cafe). At first Shirl was embarassed to tell me how much (or should I say, how little) the cake cost but she keeps forgetting that when it comes to money I am a cheapskate's cheapskate. The small cost of that cake made it all the better. Here are a couple of cake pics including the cutter doing a taste-test. And there are cake leftovers too. Guess we don't need to go anywhere else for food this weekend.


Since its the weekend we'll probably take it easy. Not entirely sure what we'll be doing but whatever it is, I'll be posting about it.


As always thanks for the morale support. God bless..


Steve

Friday April 4

Hello everybody,



Currenty the local time is about 3:30pm and our facilitator has yet to check in. We weren't expecting to hear anything about an appointment for this afternoon although knowing that we'd have something lined up for next week would have been nice. At this moment Shirley is carrying our phone and is elsewhere so its always possible that she's gotten a phone call that I am not aware of. But in all likelihood it looks as though we're going to be starting another week not knowing what direction we're headed.


When we are finally called in for our appointment, our intention is to be courteous but firm with the SDA. We certainly don't want to be rude but on the other hand we've been given a greater than average run around. Having accomplished nothing after being here for an entire month is a little difficult to stomach, especially when none of it is through any fault of our own. We have simply come too far to quit now without at least a fighting chance of taking home a little girl. I know that the SDA has good files and they know that they have good files. I also know that Shirley was meant to be a Mom.


As if playing the SDA guessing game isn't enough hassle, this being without internet is really for the birds. Not only do we use the net for blog and email but also for other personal "business". We're limited to 1-2 hours online per day at a Cafe. Personal business easily takes up most of that.


Well I suppose the cat is out of the bag. Yes today is Steve's birthday. We didn't do any sightseeing or touring today so there are no interesting pictures to post. Shirley wants to take me out for a nice birthday dinner and I opted for....you guessed it....pizza. A slice of ice cream cake would have been nice for afterwards but I've noticed that ice cream in general seems to be a rare commodity here. Maybe it has to do with the fact that these people do enough freezing during their winter. Thats OK. I'll just settle for an extra slice of pizza.


Hope everyone is doing well back home. Shirley and I are hanging in there. We appreciate all of the comments and personal emails. Keep 'em coming - its great for morale.


Steve

Thursday April 3rd

Greetings from Ukraine,



I apologize for not posting since Monday. Yesterday our internet wireless modem died on us without cause or warning. Our facilitator promised that either yesterday afternoon or today he would have the modem fixed or replaced and returned to us. It is now nearly dinnertime and still no modem, so Shirley and I opted to find an internet café for dinner and while at it, check email and post to the blog. We found this particular one fairly close; it was empty when we got here and now its jammed. At least for right now we have limited internet access until we get our wireless modem back.
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No word yet about a new appointment. Our facilitator said that today the SDA was very busy with meetings. He even said that the SDA employees were spread so thin, he couldn't see how anyone could have had an appointment today. Needless to say he was unfortunately unable to do any of his daily pestering. But as Scarlett O'Hara once said, "tomorrow is another day".


Yesterday we were moved out of our apartment by our facilitator before noon. Our new apartment is fairly close to our last one – maybe a mile or so away - but in a much quieter corner of town. We are actually closer to the Shevchenko park and the “Pok n Pop” (Rock N Roll) café that I wrote about in my last post. We feel that this apartment is in a better spot. We like being in a much smaller, quieter area without having to defy death everytime we cross the street. On the other hand we only need to walk a half block in either direction to get to one of two major thoroughfares. A grocery store is right on the corner and there are restaurants all over the place if we opt to go out. Our apartment itself is fairly spacious and has two beds compared to the one bed that we’ve had in all of our previous apartments. Interestingly, the spare bed is in the kitchen. Now when it comes to interior decorating I’ve always thought of myself as the clueless type; the right side of my brain has never been the dominant half. Yet even to a fashion invalid like me, having a bed in the kitchen seems to be a little off. On the other hand there is a practical side to this. Anyone for breakfast in bed??


Today was a cold, drizzly day which I am told is typical of Ukraine in the Spring. We went to the The Russian Art Museum that we wanted to go to on Monday but found that it was closed. Our guide book described this Art Museum as being full of art from both Russia and Ukraine. In fact we found only a small fraction of the works of art to be from either of those countries. The admission price was a little higher than the guide book said, probably because they have a special Asian art exhibit showing from March 26th through April 27th. Cost of admission was 16 hrivnas – about $3.20. Not exactly bank busting and well worth the afternoon out of the apartment. Fortunately the Museum had handouts in English describing most of the art. The Asian art exhibit seemed to be pretty heavily patrolled by both ushers and security. First of all we were not permitted to wear our overcoats; we had to check them in at the front. Then during our walk through the exhibit we were always being watched by at least one person. Sometimes more. Shirley noticed that security seemed to focus on only us. I don’t know if the Museum people were paranoid about theft but it would have been pretty tough sneaking a huge vase or a huge rug out of there even if I had my overcoat. Once we got to the regular Museum displays, the “patrols” seem to lighten up (or maybe the Museum people realized how harmless we were). There was a lot of Indian and European Renaissance stuff. There was also a huge selection of art from the Islamic parts of the world. For my own reasons I tend to avoid Muslim anything but even I will admit that the paintings, the Turkish pottery and especially the handmade Persian prayer rugs were all very ornate and beautiful.



Within half a block of the Museum is that Rock and Roll Café that I wrote about in Monday’s post. Since I already posted a picture before, no need to do it again. Shirley and I couldn’t resist checking it out and walked over there just for the sake of going in. The moment we stepped into the place, we were assaulted by Rolling Stones music. In fact that was all we heard overhead during our entire 45 minute stay. Now to an old Stones fan like myself, I didn't mind a bit - and anyone else in Kiev who likes the Stones would love it here. The music included some live versions of classic stones as well as some Russian/Ukrainian remakes; I didn't realize it at first until I heard a female singer saying how "dzumping dzack flash" is a gas gas gassss. The Cafe itself was very Applebee’s-like, not bad but somewhat trendy and definitely pricier than your typical Ukrainian places to eat. Two coffees and two plates of French fries cost about $13 including tip; kinda comparable to prices at a restaurant in the States but if you compare it to two full dinners at a Ukrainian Cafeteria-like place for about $9 total, then its obvious that being trendy is a costly hobby here in Ukraine.


We cruised by a University which was pretty active with students crisscrossing between the buildings (if you can figure out the name of the University, let me know). We figured that a place like a University would b a perfect place to look for an internet café so we began keeping our eyes peeled for anything with a WIFI sign in the window or the word “INTERNET” in Russian (at least we can read that word). Surprisingly we never did see an internet café anywhere near the University. However we did spot an interesting looking nightclub called “MEMPHIS” right by the campus. It was complete with Egyptian graphics outside of the building. We were surprised at the good deal of traffic going in and out of MEMPHIS and all of the “traffic” looked like college students, or at least people around the age of 20. I know that college kids will always be college kids; back home we also frequented the Philadelphia hot spots during my college years. Thing is, even we usually didn’t start THIS early (or at least those of us who graduated didn’t). We saved all of that fun stuff for the weekends which usually started on a Thursday night. Here – it was 3pm on a Thursday afternoon – and these kids were already getting cranked up. Who knows, maybe they’re the ones who have their priorities right and it was us college kids back in The States that had our heads screwed on backwards!


We’ll certainly keep everyone posted with our progress with the SDA and referrals. Our last wait for an appointment took a little over two weeks. Looks like that’s about what it will take this time around too.


Thanks again for reading the blog. God bless….



S&S

Tuesday April 1

Happy Tuesday,


I was going to open this blog with an announcement that we were coming home with a sibling group consisting of dekatuplets. But the wife-boss axed that April Fools joke right away. Oh well...


It was exactly one month ago today that we first arrived in Ukraine to start our adoption odyssey. For those of you who remember this blog's first in-country post, we seemed to land within a tornado of chaos. After that we were hoping that our adoption would become smooth sailing after a rough beginning. Boy were we wrong! While we're still hopeful (although not holding our breath) that we'll come home with our daughter, it is a little depressing to realize that we are no further along in our adoption process today than we were when we first landed in Kiev on March 1st.


It was a brisk day today in Kiev and the lining had to get zipped back into my London Fog overcoat. That and the pullover hat got some good use during our walks. Our facilitator had other obligations and so could not focus on our case as he has been able to during the previous several days. We expected this and so we spent the day relaxing and touring.


We still have the same apartment in this busy corner of Kiev but we will be leaving for a different apartment tomorrow afternoon (we actually got more than an hour of notice to pack…YAYYY!). We were hoping to catch a show at the Operetta before we left; Shirley checked their schedule and found that "Romeo and Juliet" will be playing at the Opera House all week. It would have been perfect; since a ballet is all dance and no dialogue we actually could have gone to something we could understand without needing an interpreter. We were looking forward to a nice night out and I suppose that we can always cab it from another part of the city. I am sure that we'll be in Kiev through the weekend.


Playing "Musical Apartments" like this is definitely getting on our nerves. As is the case with most major cities in the States, apartments are a hot commodity here in Kiev. Especially in a happenin' section of town like where we are now. It’s a pain in the neck to have to keep relocating but some of these apartments have had reservations made months in advance. We’ll do whatever we have to do. So long as we’re in Kiev, this constant shuffle is the way its going to be.


Shirley and I walked around the city this afternoon for some more exploration. We ran into a place that had “Rock and Roll Café” written on it in Cyrillic letters. It also had a graphic of Mick Jaggar’s tongue; the universal symbol of rock and roll. I suppose that this is the Ukrainian version of the Hard Rock Café. Shirley thought it was so cute and laughed her way across the street, the whole time pronouncing the English phonetics "Pok n Pop". In retrospect I am now sorry that we didn’t go into the place just to check it out and have a drink. It would have been worth at least several indoor pictures.



Right next to the "Pok n Pop" Café is the beautiful Shevchenko Park, named after Taras Hryhorovich Shevchenko, a Ukrainian folk hero. The park is roughly the length and width of a city block. To any other families adopting from Ukraine, when you return to Kiev for your final paperwork I'd recommend taking the kids here if your apartment is close enough. As you can see from the pics, Shevchenko park will keep kids occupied for a long time. Not to mention that it will be a nice spring day outing for yourselves. We passed this park several times during the past week and it always seems to be packed with people. Today’s drizzly cold obviously kept a lot of the crowds indoors which is why the park looks deserted in these pictures. I thought it ironic that this park named after a Ukrainian hero like Shevchenko would be within walking distance of a statue of Vladimir Lenin – the symbol of the communists who were among the worst of the Ukrainian oppressors. Shevchenko was a Ukrainian poet and artist but was also known as a Ukrainian Nationalist whose life of captivity under the Russians became a symbol of oppressed Ukrainians in the Russian Empire. Nowadays Shevchenko represents the liberation of the Ukrainian nation.


Want a quick bite to eat or a quick cup of coffee? How about stopping in at “MISTER SNACK”. Yes - just as I'm sure with most of you readers, the first time that we passed this place we thought that it read “Mister chek”. I figured it to be a place having to do with money; either currency exchange or else a place to cash checks, like what we have back home in the States. But we did a double take when we walked past the windows and saw people sitting at booths, shoveling food into their faces. It took a little time but then we finally realized that “CHEK” is Russian phonetics for the English word “snack”. Wow, were we thrown for a loop. Shirley and I may have three college degrees between the two of us but in this country we’re as illiterate as they come.






We'll keep you posted regarding our progress. Thanks for reading, commenting and emailing. I've also begun setting up links to the blogs of other families that are involved in adoptions, so that you can read their stories as well. Seems like every adoption is its own unique odyssey. But I do want to say that if any of these adopting families do NOT want our blog showing a link to their page, fire me off an email and the link will disappear.



God bless...




Steve

Monday March 31

Greetings from Ukraine,

We didn't hear from our facilitator until late in the afternoon. We had a feeling that since it was so late, that he had nothing new to tell us. When we finally spoke to him, it was apparent that that was the case. As he has been doing for us off and on during this entire month, he was camped outside of the SDA office today hopeful of a development. He is good at being the squeaky wheel. As of yet we still do not have a new appointment date but he is confident that there will be an appointment soon.

I do not know an exact number of families that are waiting for 2nd or 3rd appointments but I did get the impression that the number was a higher than normal. Both our facilitator and our drivers and interpreters have all said that none of them have seen anything like this scenario before in past years. They've never seen so many rejections. Until recently virtually all families selected a referral during their first appointment with only a handful needing a 2nd. Now families like us that are waiting for 2nds and 3rds seem to be the norm. No one seems to know how Ukraine evolved into such a mess.



For an early afternoon activity Shirley and I opted to take a walk to the nearby Russian Art Museum. Our travel guides described the Museum as a combination of beautiful works of art of both Russian and Ukrainian origin (some works are claimed by both Russia and Ukraine). The Museum is fairly close; a little less than an uphill mile. Unfortunately when we got there we found the Museum closed. Then when we looked at the small print of our Ukrainian guide books we saw that the museum was closed on the last Monday of every month. Wow...how's that for taking a hit from Murphy's Law? We're going to try the Museum again tomorrow or some other time during the week. We're still not sure of when we're going to have to leave this apartment.


One thing that strikes me about our neighborhood is the number of casinos that are within walking distance. Although they can't compare to the sprawling Taj Mahal or Tropicana in Atlantic City, this street is nevertheless littered with casinos. We’ve yet to go into one of them although if we keep going through money the way we’ve been, it may be a temptation that I can’t fight anymore. I used to live an hour away from Atlantic City and actually fared fairly well at their Blackjack tables. On the other hand there were days when AC bled me dry in a matter of minutes.





Finally here is a tribute to the dentists in my family, namely my sister in New Jersey and my Aunt in Seattle. How nice it is to be able to find a dentist office without having to be able to read the language, thanks to signs like this. In fact you could probably be a total illiterate and still know where to go to fix a sore tooth!! Here in Ukraine we may be suffering from boredom or otherwise going nuts but at least the family dentists back home can be assured that our teeth will make it even if we don't.






In case you couldn't tell, its been a quiet day with not much going on. But we expect that any day we'll get a phone call that will send us packing and into some kind of action; that seems to be the way things work around here. We're not sure where we'll be sleeping tomorrow night either. We've seen some new names commenting on our posts and some new names sending emails to my inbox. Thanks to everyone for your support and for being in touch.

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...