April 22, 2017: A Quiet Spring Weekend in Kiev

Saturday.  This is our one “down” weekend here in Kiev as everyone that we know locally is traveling to Italy, Poland, etc. so we have the weekend to ourselves to just stay in the apartment and enjoy some time to ourselves.

Dominica made breakfast.  Oatmeal today.

Our first order of business this morning, once everyone was finally awake and dressed, which meant that we were not going out until the middle of the day, was to head out to the grocery store.  Luciana stalled for a long time so it was close to one when we finally headed out and it had started drizzling.

We had a very successful shopping trip.  Not only did we get the food that we needed, but the girls both behaved well which has never really happened before.  They are normally out of control in grocery stores for some reason.

We tried to buy bread today but found that experience to be a little confusing.  Ukrainian bread is giant in physical size so you tend to buy partial loaves rather than full ones, which requires discussing it with the bakery staff.  But of course, the bakery staff does not speak English at all.  We got lucky and a girl that was bread shopping herself heard us speaking English and helped us by reading some of the descriptions on the bread for us and helping us to order.

We also got lucky that because it was the middle of the day there was a guy that would weigh produce for us and label it which is a major thing for us as we cannot do that ourselves as everything is in Ukrainian and there are no pictures; so when we get to the checkout the cashier has to leave to go weigh things for us which is really annoying for them.

We ate a lot of the bread today.  It was all amazing.  The rumours are true, the Ukraine is one of the best places to be getting bread.

Once we were back home we put on Star Trek: The Next Generation and picked up from where we left off.  We are towards the end of the sixth season and by the end of the night managed to get three episodes into the seventh.  Luciana spent much of the day just hanging out with Dominica and me.  Liesl, as is typical, spent the day hanging out in our room with her iPad.

Liesl and I did a walk to the grocery store for a second trip for supplies, just the two of us, later this evening.

Liesl spent some time playing The Escapist, today.  She loves that game.

We had a nice day.  We got to relax and we managed to get a bit of work done as well.  I did some testing of stuff in the lab today that was pretty valuable, did some writing, etc.

Before bed I did my DuoLingo practice.  I’m on a ten day streak now.  Getting back into the habit.

I talked to Jeremy today and got him moved to openSuse as his desktop now.