Even The Mundane Interests Me Here
Yesterday we saw a "water" truck in our parking lot behind the apartment so we decided to see how much it costs to buy water from the truck, rather than from the market. Ed took one of our empty 6.5 liter bottles down and came back with a full bottle that cost him 1 Hryvna, as opposed to the 7.6 Hryvna that this costs us at the market. Of course, we don't know whether people here buy this water only for cleaning and bathing purposes, or whether they drink it! But since we use the water almost exclusively to make tea, which requires boiling, we figured it was probably safe. We've been using it for 24 hours now, and we haven't gotten sick or died yet!
It's so hard for me to keep my blog entries short, even when I don't do much or nothing much happens. Just about everything I see is interesting in some way - either because it's just like what we have at home, or because it's so different from what we have at home!! Yesterday, for example, we saw our first fire trucks. They almost looked like toy trucks (and not toy fire engines, which are much more fully equipped). They are about the size of ambulances in the U.S. They are red, and have the same sirens, but there were no hook and ladders. Traffic did pretty much make way for them and they seemed able to get where they had to go pretty efficiently, but I wonder if they have any bigger trucks in case a building over three stories high is on fire! I certainly hope so.
Today we went to Gorky Park which is to the north of the city at the end of Sumskaya Street. While we were "researching" this expedition, we discovered that July 7 is some sort of mid-summer pagan festival, Ivan Kupalo, that involves fire, water, dancing, fortune-telling, and "strong overtones of sex." Of course we missed the whole thing! But that explains the fireworks we saw from our apartment windows.
We took a "marshrutka" on Sumskaya to the Park. A marshrutka is a minivan that usually follows a bus route, is unscheduled, leaves the first stop when it is full, and costs 1 Hryvna. They are always jam packed - a very unpleasant experience in a country where daily showers are a luxury and not routine. Fortunately, it was a very short ride (and, as I told Ed on the way there, a one-way trip, at least for me!). The park is actually lovely - it has many amusement park rides for kids, and vendors selling ice cream, hot dogs, popcorn and cotton candy, as well as sodas, water and juice. (Ed of course bought some popcorn immediately!) But it is basically a forest - there are areas carved out for the rides, but it's mostly trees, with nice trails or paths cutting through it.
You can almost always stay in the shade, and it's just lovely to be outside, even when it's warm, if there's a light breeze and it's shady! There were lots of couples sitting on benches kissing (I think most young people here have to live at home with their parents and don't have their own apartments, so this is the only "privacy" they can get - and the apartments they live in are probably cramped and hot, so it's nice to get outside on a day like today), and lots and lots of children playing in the kiddy cars or riding on the Ferris Wheel and other rides. 
There are also several places where you can rent in-line skates, and I assume that is very popular too. We wandered through the park and Ed took lots of photos (he is very pleased when I select one of his photos for the blog!). We walked by several cafes (all of which blast out loud music - this is universal in Kharkiv - it seems that every cafe blasts loud music that you can hear blocks away).
We passed rather nice tennis courts (much like the courts I used to play on in Central Park before going to the office when I worked at Paul Weiss), and a movie theater, before we found the "aerial" tram which goes from Gorky Park to nowhere! Of course we took the ride to nowhere (a 20 minute trip through the trees - very pleasant, but it doesn't compare with the zip lines in Costa Rica!!!) and back (another 20 minutes in the opposite direction. After the aerial ride we found the "Children's Railroad" which is actually a training facility for teenagers to learn the railroad trade! 
There's a beautiful and well maintained pink station and then a pint sized train (big enough for adults to sit in, but definitely smaller than a regular train), which is staffed by kids (they drive the locomotive, they wave the flags signaling the driver when he can leave the station, and they "man" each car, taking tickets as you get on. It's about a 10 minute ride between Gorky Park and Forest Park, and since we couldn't figure out what to do in Forest Park, we got back on the train for the ride back to the station with everyone else.
I wanted to walk home, but Ed was reluctant. On the ride up Sumskaya I noticed that the shops were very posh and classy once we were north of "Freedom Square" as it is officially named (Sloboda Plotchka), or Lenin Square, as it still called by everyone. This is a part of the city I hadn't seen before and I wanted to explore. but I guess I'll just come back and do it by myself one day once Ed's office finally opens! We saw the tram lines and tracks (we hadn't been able to find any trams going to Gorky Park - there were no tracks on Sumskaya), and then we saw how the tracks swung off to the east of Sumskaya (towards Pushkinskaya, our street). Ed remembered that the numbers of the trams that stop in front of our apartment are 5 and 7 - and we saw a Number 7 swing around going in the right direction (south), so we hopped on (the trams only cost 40 Kopeks). It was full, but not jammed like the minivan. We got home in about 10 minutes - right in front of our apartment entrance - at about 4 p.m., just in time for a nice cuppa!
A word about Belle before I quit the computer and fix our supper. She's been getting more and more annoying, barking every time the elevator passes our floor or, God forbid, stops at our floor - then she really goes into a frenzy. So I decided to take a cue from a great article that was in the Style Section of the NY Times last Sunday - What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage (turns out to be one of the most emailed articles in the NY Times, and was even the subject of a not very good Maureen Dowd column yesterday). So now, instead of screaming "no no - stop it, stop it right now, no no" when she starts barking, I try to get her at the first stages (the snorting and low growling stages), firmly say no, and then tell her what a good girl she is and give her a treat when she doesn't bark. And it's really working. It's only about 3 days, and she rarely barks now!! I'm going to try this method on Ed the next time he does something annoying, just as the author of the column did!
It's so hard for me to keep my blog entries short, even when I don't do much or nothing much happens. Just about everything I see is interesting in some way - either because it's just like what we have at home, or because it's so different from what we have at home!! Yesterday, for example, we saw our first fire trucks. They almost looked like toy trucks (and not toy fire engines, which are much more fully equipped). They are about the size of ambulances in the U.S. They are red, and have the same sirens, but there were no hook and ladders. Traffic did pretty much make way for them and they seemed able to get where they had to go pretty efficiently, but I wonder if they have any bigger trucks in case a building over three stories high is on fire! I certainly hope so.
Today we went to Gorky Park which is to the north of the city at the end of Sumskaya Street. While we were "researching" this expedition, we discovered that July 7 is some sort of mid-summer pagan festival, Ivan Kupalo, that involves fire, water, dancing, fortune-telling, and "strong overtones of sex." Of course we missed the whole thing! But that explains the fireworks we saw from our apartment windows.
We took a "marshrutka" on Sumskaya to the Park. A marshrutka is a minivan that usually follows a bus route, is unscheduled, leaves the first stop when it is full, and costs 1 Hryvna. They are always jam packed - a very unpleasant experience in a country where daily showers are a luxury and not routine. Fortunately, it was a very short ride (and, as I told Ed on the way there, a one-way trip, at least for me!). The park is actually lovely - it has many amusement park rides for kids, and vendors selling ice cream, hot dogs, popcorn and cotton candy, as well as sodas, water and juice. (Ed of course bought some popcorn immediately!) But it is basically a forest - there are areas carved out for the rides, but it's mostly trees, with nice trails or paths cutting through it.
You can almost always stay in the shade, and it's just lovely to be outside, even when it's warm, if there's a light breeze and it's shady! There were lots of couples sitting on benches kissing (I think most young people here have to live at home with their parents and don't have their own apartments, so this is the only "privacy" they can get - and the apartments they live in are probably cramped and hot, so it's nice to get outside on a day like today), and lots and lots of children playing in the kiddy cars or riding on the Ferris Wheel and other rides. 
There are also several places where you can rent in-line skates, and I assume that is very popular too. We wandered through the park and Ed took lots of photos (he is very pleased when I select one of his photos for the blog!). We walked by several cafes (all of which blast out loud music - this is universal in Kharkiv - it seems that every cafe blasts loud music that you can hear blocks away).
We passed rather nice tennis courts (much like the courts I used to play on in Central Park before going to the office when I worked at Paul Weiss), and a movie theater, before we found the "aerial" tram which goes from Gorky Park to nowhere! Of course we took the ride to nowhere (a 20 minute trip through the trees - very pleasant, but it doesn't compare with the zip lines in Costa Rica!!!) and back (another 20 minutes in the opposite direction. After the aerial ride we found the "Children's Railroad" which is actually a training facility for teenagers to learn the railroad trade! 
There's a beautiful and well maintained pink station and then a pint sized train (big enough for adults to sit in, but definitely smaller than a regular train), which is staffed by kids (they drive the locomotive, they wave the flags signaling the driver when he can leave the station, and they "man" each car, taking tickets as you get on. It's about a 10 minute ride between Gorky Park and Forest Park, and since we couldn't figure out what to do in Forest Park, we got back on the train for the ride back to the station with everyone else.I wanted to walk home, but Ed was reluctant. On the ride up Sumskaya I noticed that the shops were very posh and classy once we were north of "Freedom Square" as it is officially named (Sloboda Plotchka), or Lenin Square, as it still called by everyone. This is a part of the city I hadn't seen before and I wanted to explore. but I guess I'll just come back and do it by myself one day once Ed's office finally opens! We saw the tram lines and tracks (we hadn't been able to find any trams going to Gorky Park - there were no tracks on Sumskaya), and then we saw how the tracks swung off to the east of Sumskaya (towards Pushkinskaya, our street). Ed remembered that the numbers of the trams that stop in front of our apartment are 5 and 7 - and we saw a Number 7 swing around going in the right direction (south), so we hopped on (the trams only cost 40 Kopeks). It was full, but not jammed like the minivan. We got home in about 10 minutes - right in front of our apartment entrance - at about 4 p.m., just in time for a nice cuppa!
A word about Belle before I quit the computer and fix our supper. She's been getting more and more annoying, barking every time the elevator passes our floor or, God forbid, stops at our floor - then she really goes into a frenzy. So I decided to take a cue from a great article that was in the Style Section of the NY Times last Sunday - What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage (turns out to be one of the most emailed articles in the NY Times, and was even the subject of a not very good Maureen Dowd column yesterday). So now, instead of screaming "no no - stop it, stop it right now, no no" when she starts barking, I try to get her at the first stages (the snorting and low growling stages), firmly say no, and then tell her what a good girl she is and give her a treat when she doesn't bark. And it's really working. It's only about 3 days, and she rarely barks now!! I'm going to try this method on Ed the next time he does something annoying, just as the author of the column did!
posted by Susan Spivak at 4:25 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home