Belle And Susan Go Exploring
Wednesday, June 21
Last night I lost my high speed internet connection - and the dial-up worked only sporadically. I was so frustrated. It was all I could do to keep from calling Boris to ask him to get someone over here RIGHT AWAY to fix it - but I restrained myself. I tried to figure out what was wrong, but all attempts to correct the problem failed - I tried turning off the firewall and other protections, but nothing worked. Fortunately I had printed out the Saturday NY Times Crossword Puzzle and the last acrostic, so I had something to occupy my brain so I wouldn't fixate on this.
We went to bed and Ed read while I did my crossword puzzle and acrostic. Ed was just about to drift off when we heard this unbelievable DRILLING coming from directly above us or next to us, we couldn't quite tell which. We tried knocking on our walls, but they are solid cement (this is a Soviet structure after all!) - it's quite amazing that even with these solid walls we can hear the person who lives above us running around his apartment in the evening! Ed was really pissed off, and finally went out to try and figure out where it was coming from - he couldn't really hear anything next door so he went up one flight to listen on the next floor. A few minutes later our doorbell rang and it was a young woman with her young son, also trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from because her son couldn't sleep! We never did find out - it wasn't next door, and it wasn't the apartment directly above us, or the apartment next to that one either. It stopped at about 10:30 and we finally got to sleep.
I must say that it was really nice sleeping in the air conditioned bedroom, on the nice soft sheets with the down duvet and pillows I had brought from home. No bugs, no bites, no sweat!
This morning there was still no internet connection. I really wanted to use Skype to call the Russian travel agency I had discovered, to see if I could arrange to go to Moscow by sleeper train, fly to Riga and then fly back to Kharkiv. I had called yesterday and they told me to call back today when the woman who does these things would be in the office. So it was a pretty frustrating morning too because of the damn internet. We had gotten up very early because Ed was going to meet Gennady at 8:30 a.m. at the jail to see what it's like (they wouldn't be allowed in, but Ed could see the building and the line of relatives bringing food for their friends and family who were locked up). Then he was going to meet with the translator whom he had hired to read him the Criminal Procedure Code. Boris was supposed to come over with the TV Sputnik guy, but I didn't know what time he would be here. I thought I would be stuck waiting at the apartment until Ed got back, but then I realized that I could just take my cell phone with me and come home when Boris called. I had been trying to reach him and Alona to report the internet problem, but by 11 a.m. had not been able to get through to either of them.
At least I managed to figure out how to get Belle to eat more of her prescription food that we had schlepped here from the States (50 pounds of it!!!) - it looks like she can eat regular dog food now without any of her stress colitis issues, but since I brought all that food here, and since it cost a fortune, and since I knew it kept her gut healthy, I wanted to keep her on that diet. But she really doesn't like it very much, and now that she's tasted Pedigree kibble she won't touch it. So last night I pounded up the little bag of Pedigree food that I bought here when I ran out of her food (before we collected our bags from Kyiv) and made a fine powder out of it - I sprinkled some of it on her Rx food and she gobbled it up!! So finally, yesterday, for the first time since we left home, she ate twice in one day, as she is supposed to do.
This morning she even ate her breakfast before she went out for her "first thing in the morning" walk. So Ed had a lot of picking up to do on the street when he took her out after our breakfast!! He left to meet Gennady and, after cleaning up here and futzing around on the computer for a while, I decided to take a little walk around the neighborhood with Belle.
First I thought I would look for a post office so that I could buy a phone card and call the Russian travel agency from a land line. I asked the "guard" at our gate "deh poshta?" but he said "nez nayu" (I don't know). I went out front to the tram stop and asked a young woman the same question. She pointed to the building right behind me and said "vin tom" (it's there). I then had the most wonderful exchange with two lovely women, neither of whom spoke any English, trying to explain that I wanted a phone card, but NOT for the mobile phone and NOT for the pay phone. They tried soooo hard, and I tried soooo hard, but I had left my phrase book in the apartment and just couldn't be sure that the card they THOUGHT I wanted was the right one. So I thanked them both profusely and left, hoping against hope that the internet would be fixed soon and I would be able to use Skype!
I walked around the corner to the front of our apartment building and the actual street that it is on - Chubarya Street(the entrance is off Pushkinskaya, so we never go to Chubarya). It's a very pleasant tree lined street and the first floor of our building is a bank!!! I never would have guessed.
We continued around the block and ended up back at my favorite cafe at Beatric, with the nice little market, so I went in to see what I could find today. Lucky thing I did!! There were TWO boxes of Nestle Fitness (without sugar and fruits)!!! I bought them both and tried to explain that if they kept this in stock I would buy it every day. I hope they understood - I'll go back Friday and see if they have a new supply. They had some great looking baked goods there too, so I asked "Tcho se" and they said something in Russian, and a customer said "it's a cheese pie" - so I got it, and I also got two blintze looking things that are filled with jam and are supposed to be very sweet.
I came back so that I could leave Belle at the apartment while I walked up to the Kharkiv Hotel to see if the Fed Ex package that I thought had been delivered to me was actually there. Along the way I stopped at the Opera House because I thought I remembered seeing that Giselle is on tonight. It is - and I got two front row center seats (yes, front row - that's the way I like to see the ballet) for a total of 42 HVA, or $8 US!! This had better be worth it!
No Fed Ex for me at the hotel, so I started back, after changing some money (the ballet tickets had cleaned me out). I bought some more peanuts for Ed (I've concluded that the very best underground shops, and certainly the best flowers, that I've seen so far are at the University metro stop), and walked back on some different streets so I could get a better feel for the city. I saw a beautiful little theater - the Pushkin Theater - that is attached to the Russian Drama Institute on Artema Street, and I saw a Bentley - a beautiful black Bentley - parked on that same street! Hard to believe - right here in Kharkiv. The people who own it probably live in it - it is clearly nicer than any apartment I've seen here. (Although I really can't complain - our place is really very pleasant.)
And now I've learned how to upload the photos to the blog. So tomorrow I'll try my hand at that. Although, as I've said, they make the city look a lot nicer than it really is - but I do like this city, and some of these photos will show why.
But now it's time to go to our first ballet in Kharkiv - in fact, in the Ukraine!!
Last night I lost my high speed internet connection - and the dial-up worked only sporadically. I was so frustrated. It was all I could do to keep from calling Boris to ask him to get someone over here RIGHT AWAY to fix it - but I restrained myself. I tried to figure out what was wrong, but all attempts to correct the problem failed - I tried turning off the firewall and other protections, but nothing worked. Fortunately I had printed out the Saturday NY Times Crossword Puzzle and the last acrostic, so I had something to occupy my brain so I wouldn't fixate on this.
We went to bed and Ed read while I did my crossword puzzle and acrostic. Ed was just about to drift off when we heard this unbelievable DRILLING coming from directly above us or next to us, we couldn't quite tell which. We tried knocking on our walls, but they are solid cement (this is a Soviet structure after all!) - it's quite amazing that even with these solid walls we can hear the person who lives above us running around his apartment in the evening! Ed was really pissed off, and finally went out to try and figure out where it was coming from - he couldn't really hear anything next door so he went up one flight to listen on the next floor. A few minutes later our doorbell rang and it was a young woman with her young son, also trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from because her son couldn't sleep! We never did find out - it wasn't next door, and it wasn't the apartment directly above us, or the apartment next to that one either. It stopped at about 10:30 and we finally got to sleep.
I must say that it was really nice sleeping in the air conditioned bedroom, on the nice soft sheets with the down duvet and pillows I had brought from home. No bugs, no bites, no sweat!
This morning there was still no internet connection. I really wanted to use Skype to call the Russian travel agency I had discovered, to see if I could arrange to go to Moscow by sleeper train, fly to Riga and then fly back to Kharkiv. I had called yesterday and they told me to call back today when the woman who does these things would be in the office. So it was a pretty frustrating morning too because of the damn internet. We had gotten up very early because Ed was going to meet Gennady at 8:30 a.m. at the jail to see what it's like (they wouldn't be allowed in, but Ed could see the building and the line of relatives bringing food for their friends and family who were locked up). Then he was going to meet with the translator whom he had hired to read him the Criminal Procedure Code. Boris was supposed to come over with the TV Sputnik guy, but I didn't know what time he would be here. I thought I would be stuck waiting at the apartment until Ed got back, but then I realized that I could just take my cell phone with me and come home when Boris called. I had been trying to reach him and Alona to report the internet problem, but by 11 a.m. had not been able to get through to either of them.
At least I managed to figure out how to get Belle to eat more of her prescription food that we had schlepped here from the States (50 pounds of it!!!) - it looks like she can eat regular dog food now without any of her stress colitis issues, but since I brought all that food here, and since it cost a fortune, and since I knew it kept her gut healthy, I wanted to keep her on that diet. But she really doesn't like it very much, and now that she's tasted Pedigree kibble she won't touch it. So last night I pounded up the little bag of Pedigree food that I bought here when I ran out of her food (before we collected our bags from Kyiv) and made a fine powder out of it - I sprinkled some of it on her Rx food and she gobbled it up!! So finally, yesterday, for the first time since we left home, she ate twice in one day, as she is supposed to do.
This morning she even ate her breakfast before she went out for her "first thing in the morning" walk. So Ed had a lot of picking up to do on the street when he took her out after our breakfast!! He left to meet Gennady and, after cleaning up here and futzing around on the computer for a while, I decided to take a little walk around the neighborhood with Belle.
First I thought I would look for a post office so that I could buy a phone card and call the Russian travel agency from a land line. I asked the "guard" at our gate "deh poshta?" but he said "nez nayu" (I don't know). I went out front to the tram stop and asked a young woman the same question. She pointed to the building right behind me and said "vin tom" (it's there). I then had the most wonderful exchange with two lovely women, neither of whom spoke any English, trying to explain that I wanted a phone card, but NOT for the mobile phone and NOT for the pay phone. They tried soooo hard, and I tried soooo hard, but I had left my phrase book in the apartment and just couldn't be sure that the card they THOUGHT I wanted was the right one. So I thanked them both profusely and left, hoping against hope that the internet would be fixed soon and I would be able to use Skype!
I walked around the corner to the front of our apartment building and the actual street that it is on - Chubarya Street(the entrance is off Pushkinskaya, so we never go to Chubarya). It's a very pleasant tree lined street and the first floor of our building is a bank!!! I never would have guessed.
We continued around the block and ended up back at my favorite cafe at Beatric, with the nice little market, so I went in to see what I could find today. Lucky thing I did!! There were TWO boxes of Nestle Fitness (without sugar and fruits)!!! I bought them both and tried to explain that if they kept this in stock I would buy it every day. I hope they understood - I'll go back Friday and see if they have a new supply. They had some great looking baked goods there too, so I asked "Tcho se" and they said something in Russian, and a customer said "it's a cheese pie" - so I got it, and I also got two blintze looking things that are filled with jam and are supposed to be very sweet.
I came back so that I could leave Belle at the apartment while I walked up to the Kharkiv Hotel to see if the Fed Ex package that I thought had been delivered to me was actually there. Along the way I stopped at the Opera House because I thought I remembered seeing that Giselle is on tonight. It is - and I got two front row center seats (yes, front row - that's the way I like to see the ballet) for a total of 42 HVA, or $8 US!! This had better be worth it!
No Fed Ex for me at the hotel, so I started back, after changing some money (the ballet tickets had cleaned me out). I bought some more peanuts for Ed (I've concluded that the very best underground shops, and certainly the best flowers, that I've seen so far are at the University metro stop), and walked back on some different streets so I could get a better feel for the city. I saw a beautiful little theater - the Pushkin Theater - that is attached to the Russian Drama Institute on Artema Street, and I saw a Bentley - a beautiful black Bentley - parked on that same street! Hard to believe - right here in Kharkiv. The people who own it probably live in it - it is clearly nicer than any apartment I've seen here. (Although I really can't complain - our place is really very pleasant.)
And now I've learned how to upload the photos to the blog. So tomorrow I'll try my hand at that. Although, as I've said, they make the city look a lot nicer than it really is - but I do like this city, and some of these photos will show why.
But now it's time to go to our first ballet in Kharkiv - in fact, in the Ukraine!!
posted by Susan Spivak at 3:30 PM
1 Comments:
I'm so enjoying your blog, Susan. I feel like you're right here - telling me the story. Your blog title's right on...what adventures!!! Can't wait to see the pictures of paradise. :o)
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