Finally in kiev!

May 9

I was excited to be in ukraine, never been this far east of europe. I didn't know what to expect but it's a whole different world. First, no one speaks english here! People only speak either russian or ukrainian. I know one word, nyet which mean no. Ok, that's not very useful! so my backup is body language. On top of that the russian alphabet is different so you cant even try to pronounce it by looking at it. A word is usually a mix of some letters I recognize and then there are some of what looks to me like symbols. It's like trying to read chinese when you dont know the language, you can't!

Walking through the streets we noticed the women get really dressed up with short skirts and ridiculously high heel. My first clue should have been in the shoe shops that I walked through when looking for a pair of practical heels for work. There were only two extremes - flats or frickin high heels that I if I try to walk in them I would seriously hurt myself. I kind of remember when preping for my estonia audit I read that the business women dress very provocatively. It seems to be true here as well. It seems to be due to the long years of soviet suppression. Their independence has been as recent as 1991.

Our hotel is walking distance to old town where there are mucho pretty churches. They really like their gold domes here but it makes a pretty picture. The weather was perfect, cool and sunny with some puffy clouds in the sky. This city is right along a river and there are nice walking paths along the water, reminds me of dudo this way.

Because of the language barrier it was a bit challenging these past 2 weeks. Only a small handful of people at the plant can speak english. As a result they hired an interpreter to help us during interviews and reading documents which were all in local language. Everyone is very nice though.

We eat catered lunches at the plant everyday so it's an opportunity for local cuisine. I have to admit that ukrainian food is not my favorite. It's on the heavy side. Typical meal at the plant is either some kind of salads drowned in mayo then a meal consisting of buckwheat/barley and a few cubes of meat. After work we do explore the nearby restaurants. A popular type of restaurant is a cafeteria style restaurant where you choose the dishes you want. It's not the best but very cheap. We found a favorite italian restaurant that has great service and they speak english! I was excited to try their borsche since I loved it so much in estonia but was disappointed that it did not taste the same.

Last Saturday Marietta's friend who is bulgarian but has lived in kiev for 2 years took us to a traditional ukranian restaurant. It was fun to try some of the dishes he ordered for us. Here they dont use butter with the bread, instead it's pig fat which is lard. yuck. They also love dumplings here. Sometimes it's a savory dish with potato & mushroom and sometimes it's a sweet dish. Martin ordered a dessert dumpling which was filled with berries and you dip it in jam and sour cream. They seem to put sour cream in everything! Especially soup.

Another thing - I have not seen any asians here! What's going on? Therefore no big surprise when i don't see any asian restaurants except for japanese. I really miss it and going without for 3 wks is tough. I have one night in dudo before I fly back to phx so I think I will be going to the vietnamese restaurant there.