I'm Having A Bad Day
Monday, June 19
I'm having a bad day. I spent the entire morning trying to get plane tickets from Kharkiv to Moscow, Moscow to Riga, and Riga back to Kharkiv - it's quite clear that one can't get anywhere from here. Kharkiv is only about 350 miles west of Moscow and 250 miles east of Kyiv - yet to fly to Moscow from Kharkiv, you have to go first to Kyiv and then wait 5 hours for the next plane to Moscow!!!! Coming back is even worse - we have to fly back to Kharkov through Vienna and change planes there!!!! And it costs a fortune - anywhere from $1000 to $2000 each! The trains are terrible - the only one that goes to Moscow is a sleeper and that's just impossible for Ed (and pretty much for me too - we did that once from Florence to Paris on what was supposed to be a super-duper train and it was pretty awful, so I don't think the old Soviet leftovers are going to be very good). Thank goodness I don't have the travel bug right now - maybe we'll go to London and do the trip from there!!
After 3 or 4 fruitless hours on line, I decided to try and use a travel agent. When I pulled up the names of travel agents in the Ukraine and tried to email them, each and every email came back as undeliverable. Only one had a website, and that was only in Russian, and I tried everything to make a call to one of them (Mir - the travel agency I had been to a few days ago in a futile effort to get the train tickets to Kyiv), but for the life of me I can't figure out how to make a phone call within the city!!! I tried including the entire area code, leaving off some of it, adding an 8 (all calls to cell phones here, for example, must be preceded by an 8) - absolutely every permutation and combination - no luck. I was very frustrated!!
But I did have a nice Skype conversation with Jill, even though it was 11:30 p.m. her time (she called me - I wouldn't call, even on Skype, at that hour!) And I had great success making Belle's Ukrainian dog tag. Before we left the States I found a dog tag "kit" somewhere on line and bought it. It comes with three different tags and a Sharpie pen. The tags are huge, and you write the dog's name and other information on the tag with the Sharpie. I put my Ukrainian cell phone number, Ed's Ukrainian cell phone number, and Belle's name, in Ukrainian, on the tag. After preheating the oven to 325 (fortunately they give the Celsius equivalent - my brand new toaster oven is C not F), you put in a piece of cardboard they supply, with a piece of white paper they also supply on top of it, in the oven and bake that for 1 minute. Then you put the tag, face up, on the paper covered cardboard and bake for 5 minutes. The tag shrinks to a regular tag size, you take it out of the oven, let it cool and cover it with a clear plastic covering they provide and, voila, a dog tag!!! I chose the yellow bone for her first tag - we'll save the paw print and I heart my dog for later. This was the one bright spot in a pretty bad morning.
Meanwhile Boris came with Oda, the house cleaner. I explained to him that I wanted her to really clean the kitchen, and especially the oven. I also asked him to explain that this wasn't OUR dirt - that someone else had left this crud here. I also got him to explain that I wanted all the pieces moved so that she could sweep behind and between them, and that I also wanted the insides of all the cabinets cleaned. Oda will take our dirty sheets each Monday and get them cleaned, and I will use my other set (the one I brought from home) until the next Monday, when we begin the process all over again. So that solves the problem of how to get my sheets laundered and dried - we have a washing machine here, and it looks like the knobs are in English so I should be able to wash everything else and dry everything on a line over the bathtub or on the drying rack that is here. Oba was here about 3 hours (she gets $5 for each visit!) and then I got thedirty laundry out so I could try and run the machine.
It seemed pretty simple - I didn't have a measuring cup, and the Tide box instructions are in Russian, but there are little pictures on the washing machine, and it looked like I was supposed to put the detergent in this little slot on top of the machine that has three compartments and then select a "cottons" wash. I turned knobs and pressed buttons and the machine started up. These machines take a long time - about 1 1/2 or 2 hours. When it finally stopped and I opened the door, it didn't seem that the machine had used hot water, and the clothes didn't really smell very fresh. I also had a lot of trouble with the drying rack, which is more like a grid than lines to hand things over - I think you're supposed to lay things on top, but that means I can wash about two things at a time!! I poked around the machine some more and saw that NO detergent had been used and that there was now water in one of the three slots! Oy vey - what to do now? I started all over again - I pushed a few different buttons, turned on the machine, and now I'm leaving to take Belle for a walk and do some errands.
I'm having a bad day. I spent the entire morning trying to get plane tickets from Kharkiv to Moscow, Moscow to Riga, and Riga back to Kharkiv - it's quite clear that one can't get anywhere from here. Kharkiv is only about 350 miles west of Moscow and 250 miles east of Kyiv - yet to fly to Moscow from Kharkiv, you have to go first to Kyiv and then wait 5 hours for the next plane to Moscow!!!! Coming back is even worse - we have to fly back to Kharkov through Vienna and change planes there!!!! And it costs a fortune - anywhere from $1000 to $2000 each! The trains are terrible - the only one that goes to Moscow is a sleeper and that's just impossible for Ed (and pretty much for me too - we did that once from Florence to Paris on what was supposed to be a super-duper train and it was pretty awful, so I don't think the old Soviet leftovers are going to be very good). Thank goodness I don't have the travel bug right now - maybe we'll go to London and do the trip from there!!
After 3 or 4 fruitless hours on line, I decided to try and use a travel agent. When I pulled up the names of travel agents in the Ukraine and tried to email them, each and every email came back as undeliverable. Only one had a website, and that was only in Russian, and I tried everything to make a call to one of them (Mir - the travel agency I had been to a few days ago in a futile effort to get the train tickets to Kyiv), but for the life of me I can't figure out how to make a phone call within the city!!! I tried including the entire area code, leaving off some of it, adding an 8 (all calls to cell phones here, for example, must be preceded by an 8) - absolutely every permutation and combination - no luck. I was very frustrated!!
But I did have a nice Skype conversation with Jill, even though it was 11:30 p.m. her time (she called me - I wouldn't call, even on Skype, at that hour!) And I had great success making Belle's Ukrainian dog tag. Before we left the States I found a dog tag "kit" somewhere on line and bought it. It comes with three different tags and a Sharpie pen. The tags are huge, and you write the dog's name and other information on the tag with the Sharpie. I put my Ukrainian cell phone number, Ed's Ukrainian cell phone number, and Belle's name, in Ukrainian, on the tag. After preheating the oven to 325 (fortunately they give the Celsius equivalent - my brand new toaster oven is C not F), you put in a piece of cardboard they supply, with a piece of white paper they also supply on top of it, in the oven and bake that for 1 minute. Then you put the tag, face up, on the paper covered cardboard and bake for 5 minutes. The tag shrinks to a regular tag size, you take it out of the oven, let it cool and cover it with a clear plastic covering they provide and, voila, a dog tag!!! I chose the yellow bone for her first tag - we'll save the paw print and I heart my dog for later. This was the one bright spot in a pretty bad morning.
Meanwhile Boris came with Oda, the house cleaner. I explained to him that I wanted her to really clean the kitchen, and especially the oven. I also asked him to explain that this wasn't OUR dirt - that someone else had left this crud here. I also got him to explain that I wanted all the pieces moved so that she could sweep behind and between them, and that I also wanted the insides of all the cabinets cleaned. Oda will take our dirty sheets each Monday and get them cleaned, and I will use my other set (the one I brought from home) until the next Monday, when we begin the process all over again. So that solves the problem of how to get my sheets laundered and dried - we have a washing machine here, and it looks like the knobs are in English so I should be able to wash everything else and dry everything on a line over the bathtub or on the drying rack that is here. Oba was here about 3 hours (she gets $5 for each visit!) and then I got thedirty laundry out so I could try and run the machine.
It seemed pretty simple - I didn't have a measuring cup, and the Tide box instructions are in Russian, but there are little pictures on the washing machine, and it looked like I was supposed to put the detergent in this little slot on top of the machine that has three compartments and then select a "cottons" wash. I turned knobs and pressed buttons and the machine started up. These machines take a long time - about 1 1/2 or 2 hours. When it finally stopped and I opened the door, it didn't seem that the machine had used hot water, and the clothes didn't really smell very fresh. I also had a lot of trouble with the drying rack, which is more like a grid than lines to hand things over - I think you're supposed to lay things on top, but that means I can wash about two things at a time!! I poked around the machine some more and saw that NO detergent had been used and that there was now water in one of the three slots! Oy vey - what to do now? I started all over again - I pushed a few different buttons, turned on the machine, and now I'm leaving to take Belle for a walk and do some errands.
posted by Susan Spivak at 4:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home