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.

Glass Walls

Normally, I'm the observant one in the family. Sometimes too observant. Yesterday while wandering out of an underground shopping mall towards the metro I turned my head ever so slightly to consider the Coffee & Tea Kiosk to my right with a lovely display of tea pots. (ours is currently handle-less). In my interest in the tea pots, I failed to adequately notice that the "hallway" immediately to the left was the perfectly cleaned, unadorned glass walls of the Apple store. I turned too soon and ran SPLAT into the glass wall.

Momentarily stunned, my eyes focused enough to see the Apple Guy looking up from his computer and staring at me. The two chattering girls behind me had fallen into muffle silence, though that was very soon replaced by rollicking laughter. I, on the other hand, stumbled away from the wall and tried to not limp my way down the real passageway to the metro. I have a bruise on my leg and my eyebrow bone is sore to the touch, and a big imprint of my face was left on the glass. Fortunately, Kiev is a big city, I don't have an Apple, and am not likely to be there, or recognized by any of the witnesses, anytime soon.

A lazy post after a long delay

It seems like I haven't gotten back into the once a week routine yet of posting since getting back from the states. But - this time I have an excuse :-) We had some good friends of mine from Linfield come for a 10 day visit and I was busy showing them about the contry and the city. If you want a fresh perspective on Ukraine, and also a view of what we did - check out their posts for the begining of September.
Aside from that - it is the same old same old. Group, People, Groceries, House cleaning, Church and the like. Alister did have a brief change of pace as he went to Wales to start his ThM Hooray - things in that department are finally started and underway. One bump in the road is that they changed the due date for the course work (moved it up) and he'll also be teaching a course here in Ukraine mid October and then grading papers - so it'll make it a bit hectic for Alister this fall, but we need a little bit of a challenge.
The weather is starting to turn nippy here and I'll soon need to stock up on apples to make apple sauce and Mince. I promised Alister I would do a Christmas pudding this year so I'll need to make enough for pies and a small pudding.

August Spas

Last week, Alister and I visited Pecherska Lavra. It was Saturday the 15th, and we were going there to meet up with an old friend of Alister's from his time in Russia. His friend is Orthodox, and he was only in Kiev for the day in order to visit the monastery.

I was glad to go to the Lavra - it is a lovely place and I had seen signs that on the 14th the Medovi Spas would start. I had heard the year before, that this was great thing to go to, you could buy honey, pollen, wax, propolis, and any number or bee-products from all over Ukraine. Literally, Medovi Spas means "Honey Salvation". But I didn't really understand why or what and so I translated it the Honey festival to anyone I mentioned it to.

Thursday was Jablok Spas. Which literally means "Apple Salvation". A Kyiv Post article detailed the holiday and said people brought their apples to the church to be blessed. The apples (not from our village) have begun to be harvested. The beautiful white-fleshed Slava apples with a deliciously tart flavor. Hmm I thought, If ever there was a pagan tradition that the church was trying to "reclaim" this is it. Stamp out the pagan revelry with a staunch fast but a blessing of the harvest as token.

It turns out, that Honey Spas (August 14th) marks the beginning of one of the strictest Orthodox Fasts, Apple Spas falls in the middle on the Feast Day of the Transfiguration Of Jesus Christ - the fast continues BUT on this day you can eat fish. The fast finally ends on Nut Spas - the Feast of The Dormition of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary (In other words - on the day she supposedly died). In fact, the whole fast was in honor/preparation for her death. At least, it is considerably shorter than Lent which of course is a fast that is in Preparation/Honor of Christ's death and resurrection.

At the Lavra, we sat on the benches on the stone plaza outside of the upper caves. To the left, a long line of people formed, confessing their sins over a Bible to a Priest. Honey vendors lined the road leading to the smaller caves. People crowded about, eating honeycomb, asking for samples, and buying their Honey from what is considered the most holy of places. And there were bees. Swarms of bees around every vender, trying to reclaim the honey that they had worked so hard to make. Bees are such miraculous creatures. To think that God could have made them make not very much honey, so that there would have been only enough for their own needs, but instead a hive can produce so many times more than what they can eat so that we can not only eat the honey, but use the wax, and nibble their pollen and use the propillis to clean our teeth or whatever else it does. But I digress.
But I'm not quite sure what I digress from - My surprise at discovering the meaning of the Spas? The confusion that "Spas" - Salvation would be linked to harvest items - is there confusion - that salvation is from the honey the apples, and the nuts? Or is it a clear reference to Christ - Saviour and gifter of Honey, Apples, and Nuts?

Maybe these are discoveries for another time.