Talented friends

A friend from church lost her job in the first wave of the crisis last year (she is a graphic designer) but instead of being stumped - she put her talents to things around her and is now making and designing dog clothing, or at least clothing for a Yorkshire Terrier. She is incredible talented and has basically taught herself to sew and has just started looking at pictures on the internet and making her own. I just had to share one of the incredible people around us (also if you're interested in some custom made clothes for your loyal companion - let us know!)

Dreary Days of Winter

It is well into fall here and we are waiting for our heat to turn on. 17 people in our apartment haven't been paying bills apparently and so the hot water has been off/sporadic since the end of July and we wonder if the heat will actually come on at all.

Fortunately - Tuesday our apartment became the new home for a brand new water heater. Ah the bliss of a warm water out of a tap rather than a bucket. We are very thankful for our Landlord to buying it without any prodding or begging from us - in fact - up until the last two weeks - we were willing to stick it out till the building resolved the problem (then it started getting very very cold). Now with our little space heater or the oven happily baking squash, or muffins, or anything else i can think of to throw in it - we are quite content.

Cars, traffic and transport

Alister and I live an 8 minute walk from the metro. We are very thankful for this, because despite the suffocating press of people during rush hour, it is the only transportation that you can get on and know for sure you will reach your destination in a set time period.

An open democracy article highlights the problem of traffic in Moscow. Kiev isn't quite so bad - but it isn't far behind either. If you read the article - not that Moscow has twice as many cars per hectare (10,000 sq meters) than new york. Another interesting tidbit - for some reason a highway would cost 100 million to build there while the same equivilant highway would cost 6 million in the US.

The main problem in Kiev and Moscow and most european cities are the same - you have old, narrow streets that are now being utilized to carry way more traffic than they were designed for and there is no space to expand.

Books and such

I know, I know. I'm doing a lousy job at posting once a week.
Part of that is because I've been doing some free lance translation and editing and just being kept busy with other things as well.
In the mean time, I've been trying to find time to read/ listen to classics. I just finished Ivanhoe, which I read as a Senior in high school and loved and thought it time to read again. One thing I missed/forgot had no idea of was that King Richard the lion heart was a Norman - ie French - which I found amazing since he was so well loved.
I then decided I really needed to actually KNOW Shakespeare rather than just know of him - and I found this great site that actually has audio recordings of a lot of his plays for free. So this is my new kitchen listening :-) I'm trying to convince Alister to read them with me - but part of the idea of reading is to get AWAY from the computer - and although we can find the scripts easily enough - I don't think we really want to print them out - so i'll have to ask around and see what copies of Shakespeare are floating around in Kiev among my acquaintances.
I was trying to find a free audio of Measure for Measure but with no luck. Anyway - this is play I have heard absolutely nothing about and thought it would be fun to read "Shakespeare's darkest tragedy.
We also watched (from the climax to the end! - talk about a weird place to start) the Merchant of Venice - which was also fantastic and I am determined to read/watch/ listen to the whole thing soon as well. Thankfully - we were able to make out what was going on - listen to a couple of fabulous monologues in the court room scene and use Wikipedia to fill in the blanks. It was especially interesting to read it in light of reading Ivanhoe as well since the theme of prejudice against Jews is obviously a center of both.