Cultural Resizing

We are waking at about 7:30 every morning here to the sound of the bus outside our window.  We are living in a tiny apartment over a bank on a major thoroughfare.  All night we hear dogs and neighbors over our white noise app on the Kindle.  On our better moments we see that we are more comfortable than we might have been and than most of the Ukrainians around us.  On our less than better moments we see the drastic differences between this place and home.  It isn't just about comfort.  It's a sense of grey here better shown in pictures.

Here is a tour of our temporary digs.  It's very Euro-chic-minimalist. Some things are funny.  Other things test our American sensibilities a little more and take a little getting used to.  We are grateful for WiFi though it is really spotty, goes out every few minutes and doesn't work at all in the evening.  It makes us feel less alone here.


The bathroom: we have one, which is great!  It even has a toilet which we'd heard was hard to come by.  Some toilets in Ukraine are little more than a hole in ground, like at Liza's orphange and has no toilet paper.  Ours even flushes.  Without a shower curtain it's hard to keep the rest of the bathroom dry though. So far, we only have 3 hand towels for 6 people to dry off with.

We were relieved to find that our facilitator had rented us one three bedroom apartment (about 550 sq ft) and a second studio for my parents 2 doors down.  This is bedroom #1 in our unit.  Mercy likes to watch I Love Lucy at night.

Bedroom #2

and Bedroom #3.  We each get a bed to share with one other person which is a big plus.  They just don't have any sheets on them and only one blanket.  The are some unpleasant midnight blanket tug of wars.

This is the rest of our apartment from the entryway.  The landlord is fantastic, likes to try to speak his best English words with us and has bought us some brand new tiny cups and saucers ;)

This is the kitchen.  It is approximately 1/10 the size of my supersized American kitchen and has 1/100 the tools.  But the hot plate is induction which is way cool.  And we splurged and bought a $20 coffee maker so we wouldn't have to wander the city in our pjs, speaking decaffeinated Russian and spending far more grivna (Ukrainian $).  Mom and Tom are working on making chicken.

Standing at Bedroom #3 this is how much space we have to lounge at night.  Three of us can sit on the couch.  Everybody else has to go to bed. lol.







I kid you not, this is the broom.  I even saw the street sweeper using one.  And by street sweeper, I mean a little old man sweeping the street.

Our attempt at decorating for Christmas <3  Thanks Grandma Susan for the beautiful new stocking for Liza to match ours.  She hasn't seen hers yet but Tom told her that her other babushka in America sewed something special for her.  She said "ooooh!"

The city.  It's a whole lot of concrete.

Our 3 ounce coffee cups and you cannot see our Grande moodiness that results.

Breakfast for 8 on one hotplate.  We have a SuperMarket several blocks from here that is fantastic.  We have to go daily because the kitchen is too small to hold more than a one day supply.  The produce is amazing and all organic.  A people group whose government doesn't legalize their cancer causing foods, is foreign to us.  It makes me all the more ashamed of our FDA than I was before.  We are eating much better now (for our allergies).  Ukrainian food is really good, but there isn't much available when traveling.  And of course feeding 8 people in restaurants will blow through our cash in a few weeks.

Dinnertime:  we take turns eating.  There aren't enough forks to go around.

During the day, we use this kitchen space to practice our TKD forms and one-steps.

For this time of year there's a lot of flies and ants in our apartment.  Sometimes the flies really make you feel the filth. It might be because of the pollution everywhere.  This is pretty typical.  There are actually piles of garbage taller than me on the streets.  The piles of rubble seem very stereotypical of images many Americans have in their heads of Post-Soviet cultures.

Stray cats and dogs are EVERYWHERE.  Concerned about various diseases, we have told Isabel to leave them alone.  But she's named them anyway.  Dozens of them.

This is the entrance to our apartment building.  This is in the "newly remodeled and safer part of town".  

We have been instructed not to drink the water.  Not even to brush our teeth with it.  It's a lot like camping.  It is for flushing, washing dishes and showering only.  We go through a lot of these.  So we grab a few of these each time we go to the store.

This incredible orthodox church is right around the block from us.  It's immaculate and matches nothing else in the city.  Just stunning.

These old women sit outside the church on Sunday morning and are given money by all who enter.  Wouldn't you rather give your spare change to these elderly widows than a capable man standing on our US streets with an iPhone in his pocket?

These pictures sum up the mixed emotions on our extended stay here in Ukraine pretty well.  We love the children here, we love the people here, we love learning the language and eating the produce.  But you cannot deny the lack of progress, the lack of color that blue and yellow buildings cannot change.  The Soviet Era really handicapped this country and hurt its children.