Sheep Guarding Llama

Thursday, in Kiev, Ukraine. Dominica started the day making Turkish coffee, as we still do not have any form of a coffee maker.  She is getting pretty good at doing this, now.  It takes a bit more skill to make coffee like this, but it is actually really good. We had a couple rounds of Turkish coffee before I took the girls to the playground.  They had gone the other day and Liesl has been working on her monkey bar skills and has been wanting to show them off to me.  So I promised that we would make a playground trip this morning since I was going to be home.  Dominica stayed home, just the girls and I went.

There are a few playgrounds in our little courtyard area between the old apartment buildings.  It is nice that there are decent places to walk and play and sit all without needing to even go next to the street, let alone across it.

I took the day off from going into the office, today.  So we got a nice family day at home with time to relax, catch up on some things, go for walks and to the playground and watch movies.  We’ve been going pretty steady for over a week, a day of nothing was very much needed.

This evening at home, Dominica and I watched Zoolander which we have not seen in a long time.  We have always liked that movie and it is available on Netflix here so a good chance to watch it.  The sequel movie has released and we want to see that, but wanted to rewatch the original first.

The second movie, Zoolander 2, was also available on Netflix so, as you can guess, we watched them back to back.  The second one was not nearly as good as the first, but it was okay.  We enjoyed it and are glad that we got the chance to see it while we were here.

Dinner was Ukranian ramen noodles that the apartment.  We are being really fancy today.

 

Thursday.  We had a raining spring night last night but awoke to a warm and sunny Kiev spring morning today.  A gorgeous day and I am excited to get out for another walk through the city.

Dominica made turkish coffee on the stove this morning.  We do Turkish when we lack a coffee maker.  Max is going to bring is own over at some point for us.

We had three rounds of coffee before I went into the office.  Anton was going past this morning so I just rode in with him.  That gave me more coffee time at home.

I have a secretary at the office that makes me coffee all day as well.  I got a desk today, too.  They brought one in and moved it into Anton and Max’s office.  So I am sitting with them, now.

Tonight, after work, Max and I went out to Barvy’s where Anton joined us later.  Great cocktail list here.  But we could not stay long, barely time for one round of drinks as they close very early.

Max enjoyed his Kiev Mule very much.

Each drink was quite large.

After the bar closed down and kicked us out (we were the last ones there) we went over to a Swedish restaurant and did pickled fish for dinner!

Delish dinner.  Then it was home.  At one thirty in the morning, there was some drunk guy in front of our door yelling so loudly that I thought that he might be yelling at me.  But he was just drunk and lost, I believe.

 

Tuesday.  Today I got up and decided to tackle the adventure of walking into the office all by myself.  Everyone offered to send a car for me, but that defeats so much of the purpose of living in such an awesome city.  I want to get out and get exercise, experience life in Kiev, and get some fresh air.  It is Spring in Kiev after all and it is gorgeous here, much like I imagine people expect Paris to be in spring time.  It is the perfect temperatures for doing some walking.  Chilly, but not actually cold.  If I was not walking, it would be far too cold.  But walking, it is good.

Kiev, as a city, reminds me a lot of Chisinau, which to be fair is the only other ex-Soviet city that I have spent time in so it makes a lot of sense that they remind me of each other.

So my walk in this morning went pretty well and I managed to not make any wrong turns.  I even had Max zip past me on his electrified bicycle while I was walking.  He saw me and stopped to chat for a minute before heading into the office.  It was handy that he saw me because he was able to explain the final turns to get to the office as it does get just a little complex navigating the small streets right at the end.

It is handy that so many people smoke at the office as there is always a congregation of smokers out in front making it very easy to find as you walk up the street, and there is always someone ready to unlock the door for me.  It also gives me a chance to stand out in the cold and cool down before going into the office.  It is a decent walk and while I don’t sweat while walking, if I go from walking hard in the chill to inside a warm office all of a sudden, I will sweat like crazy.  But if I let myself freeze outside first, I can do the office without a problem.

Everyone was pretty amazed that I had walked so far without a coat.  They were all bundled up and freezing outside.  I was decently comfortable in just a normal shirt and jeans.

For lunch today, Anton and I went out for pizza downtown.  It was really good pizza, but probably not as good as we normally get in New York or Italy.  We are a bit spoilt for pizza selection in our lives.

He also showed me around the high end grocery store in the city.  Wow is it impressive. It makes grocery stores back in the US just look silly.  While there I got meringues and beers to take back to the office.

There was so much amazing food at the grocery store.  Much of it that they made right there.  There were even several restaurants, including a wine bar, inside of the grocery store!

We put in a day at the office.  Then this evening Anton and I met up with some friends and drove out to far into the left bank and went to a brew pub way out in the suburbs of Kiev.  The beer was really good and we had a good time.  Very nice place.

It turned out that one of the guys that we were hanging out with was telling me about his business and suddenly I realized that he was the CEO of a company that I knew and had written about, even just today while on MangoLassi!  So that was really interesting and we had a good time hanging out.

The men’s room at the brew pub, which was a fancy, modern place, had one of the old fashioned hole in the floor toilets that I would never have expected to find here.  This is a first in Ukraine.

I had to take a picture as we are always talking about how we find these around the world.  I was really not expecting one in a new, nice brew pub!

It was not a late night tonight.  Got dropped off back at the apartment.

 

Monday.  Our first week day in Kiev.  I got up to a gorgeous morning.  Bright sun, crisp air, light breeze.  Just gorgeous.  And, as Liesl pointed out, a city that is far cleaner than anything in Italy.  Leave it to Liesl to notice the litter, or lack of it here.

Once up, I got picked up and driven into the office.  It really is not very far, but Anton insisted on driving me today.  So I just went in with him to make things extra easy.  I got a tour of the place, which is much larger than I was expecting it to be.  Multiple buildings and pretty much right in the center of the city.  Really nice facility.

We went out for lunch today to an Indian place that is near the office.  It was a big restaurant and really nice, but there was no one there but us.  Just the two of us in this giant place.  I have no idea how they make any money, it makes no sense.

 

Lunch was really good.  It was a short day in the office.  I went home and spent some time with the family.

Then this evening, Max and one of the guys from the office picked me up (via Uber) from the apartment and we went out to find an authentic Georgian restaurant that is well known.  Georgian food is common throughout the former USSR states because Georgia is the heartland of comfort food in Eastern Europe and was considered the best food in the whole of the USSR.  So today, much as how Italian places are common in the US and most western countries, Georgian are common in eastern European states.

This was a fully authentic Georgian restaurant with menus actually in Georgian. I’ve had Georgian before, in New Jersey, and it was decently authentic, but not to the same level at all.  This was really serious and, of course, we are in Kiev so this is a pretty good place to get real Georgian.  Nearly as good as you can get without going to Georgia itself.  Georgia is one of our top “places we need to go see next” on our travels.

I got a small khachapuri (cheese bread) which was off the hook amazing.  First, it was huge.  I mean really huge.  Like more than a pound of food.  Super hot, fresh bread in kind of a bowl shape, full of super hot liquid cheese.  They bring it to the table like that.  Then they break a few raw eggs into the cheese and whip it up right there in front of you at the table.  The cheese is so hot that it cooks the eggs almost instantly.  So it is kind of like scrambled eggs, but so thinly divided in all of the cheese that it just adds to the general body of the whole thing.

It is hard to eat both because it is very messy, but also because it is very hot and greasy.  You just grab and break off pieces of bread and dip it into the eggy cheesy goo in the middle.  Delicious.  I have wanted to try this for years.  So glad that I got to have it here.  Totally amazing.  I’m so sorry that Dominica was not able to come along; she would have loved getting to try this.  The cheese and bread as so unique.  They are not things that can be easily replicated in some other region of the world.  So getting this in the US would be, I assume, essentially impossible.

We also got some Georgian sampler platters of dips and veggies and stuff.  All of it was great.  I was so full by the time that we were done.

After dinner we took a long walk through the city to get to the metro and took that at Golden Gate station, so I got to see the opera, Golden Gate, and other major landmarks on the walk.  Kiev is a nice city to walk through, very safe and easy to navigate.  But it is large so going everywhere on foot is not very practical.

Golden Gate Metro was fun to get to go into.  Entering it requires you to go down the two steepest and longest escalators I have ever seen in my life.  I mean seriously deep.  I know that there is possibly the world’s deepest escalator in the Kiev metro system, but it is not this one.  This might be number two, however.  It is so long that you get vertigo just looking down it. If you are not careful you will get mesmerized and just fall forward and topple down it!

Max gave me a mini tour of the subway station which was insanely interesting.  It was very large and cavernous.  He explained that this was a Cold War nuclear shelter meant for Kiev residents to flee to and would protect them from a direct nuclear hit on the city above.  The giant blast doors still work and are tested regularly.  They were giant round doors that would close and as they closed people would be unable to get out and would slide down the doors into the subway station.  That this whole complex was built so deep and so thoroughly to protect them against us made it that much more interesting.  Very akin to the Halifax citadel.

So I got to ride the Kiev metro back to near the apartment and then walk just a small way from there.  It was a nice night, just a little bit chilly.  But I enjoyed the walk and seeing the city.  I am going to like it here.  I have found that I really enjoy eastern Europe.  Food, culture, people, and often even the weather here suit me very well.

Tomorrow I am going to attempt walking to the office all by myself.  I have no pressing need to be anywhere at any particular time so if it takes a while or if I get lost it is not a big deal.

At this point, very happy with Kiev and Ukraine.  I just wish that the family could come out with us.  Although everyone, I am sure, is very much enjoying some decompression time right now and is pretty happy to not have to go anywhere.  Having solid Internet, television, Netflix, power, and water is a bit of a novelty for them and they are all taking advantage of it.

In the office I have a redundant gigabit connection, so even faster than the apartment!  We are going to get spoiled.

Sunday.  We woke up to a beautiful early spring day in Kiev.  Liesl and I were up early this morning.  Luciana was tired and needed a lot more sleep.

First task this morning is getting all of the devices in the house charged.  Most things are dead after a full day of traveling yesterday.  So we carefully got as many things plugged in as we could.

One semi-casualty of the packing and moving is my Kindle Fire tablet.  At some point in Noto it had fallen into a couch and been lost.  It worked its way into the mechanism of the pull out folding bed and had been sat on, a lot.  The case is pretty much destroyed and we thought that it was completely dead for sure.  But after working on it for a bit, it seems to take a charge still and turn on.  So it might limp along for a bit.  It is certainly in very rough shape, though, and I can’t believe that it will last for much longer.  Any abuse and it is just going to fall into pieces.

This afternoon Anton and Max picked us up, and two of Anton’s kids came along, and we went out to go sight seeing in Kiev.  We explored some parks and historic areas, walked some downtown neighbourhoods and then went out for lunch in a really cool restaurant with hanging tables. I had a veggie burger that was really excellent.

Then we went out for pastries which the girls liked very much.  The meringues in Kiev are amazing.

On the way home we went up one of the big hills in Kiev by taking the city’s public funicular up the hill.  That was a cool treat.  We miss out in the US by not having these types of transportation.  They only make sense in cities that cater to a populace that gets out and goes lots of places on foot.  If no one is walking around, funiculars just do not do anyone any good.

We had a very fun afternoon and Kiev really is a gorgeous city.  It is the seventh largest and one of the oldest cities in Europe.  The Internet access here is crazy.  It is so fast.  Maybe the fastest that I’ve ever gotten to use at home.  Although my Internet at the house in Texas is quite fast.

After the family was dropped off back at the apartment, Anton and I ran some errands and went back to his apartment for tea.

While Anton and I were running errands, Max went to the apartment and picked up Dominica and the kids and took them out to the local grocery store so that they could stock up on supplies.  The apothecary is right around the corner from the house, between the apartment and the grocery store, too.  So everything is easy to get to and she knows where it is now and we are all set for a couple of days before we need to venture out and figure out grocery shopping on our own.

After tea we drove out to meet up with Max and Taras at a hard core, underground, knock and know the password speakeasy.  It was a great place and the drinks were fantastic.  We had a really cool evening out.  What a great introduction to Kiev.

So it is only one day, but we are already loving this city.  Great food, beautiful parks and architecture, the people are wonderful, the bar scene is excellent.

We are looking forward to our time here in Ukraine.  Tomorrow I will be going into the office to hang out with the guys.