Day 20 – Friday, 1 January, 2010 Back home, back to regular life and home responsibilities, along with getting ready for Trip #2…I will be taking a brief hiatus from the blog this week while I try to enjoy the last couple days of Christmas Break, and scramble to do eight loads of laundry and repack. I fly out next Sunday morning, returning to Ukraine to take custody of Lena on Tuesday the 12th. We’ll have about 3 hard days of solid travel, and then end up back in Kiev on Wednesday. We are due to fly into New York […]

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Day 19 – Thursday, 31 December It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, 3:20 AM is really freaking early. Our driver arrived at 3:45 and helped pile all our luggage into the van…and we were off to the airport for a 6:45 flight. It took just under an hour to get to the airport. Our translator met us there, and told us that our flight had been delayed by an hour, so we had plenty of time to check in. He and our driver piled all our luggage on a cart, found our check-in area, and bid us […]

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Day 18 – Wednesday, 30 December First class train pillows resemble bricks a bit less than their second-class counterparts. I will say, also, that the bathrooms in the first-class car are infinitely better than the second-class. Almost worth the increased price! As a result of the improved environment, my sleep was slightly less bad than the first train trip. Mark is starting to get a bit of a cold, so he barely slept at all. I was up before the sun, and as the light came up, I packed our things away. Mark needed to sign some documents at the […]

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Day 17 – Tuesday, 29 December If a candlelight dinner is romantic, what do you call a shower by the flame of a tankless waterheater?? One thing that we had noticed this trip was the improved availability of public utilities…we hadn’t had a single power or water outage on this trip, except for on the train. Around 9:30, as I finished writing, Mark showered and shaved; as I opened the bathroom door and flipped on the light, the light flipped back off again. Checked the switch, it was on. Checked the next room, no light. On our very last day, […]

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Day 16 – Monday, 28 December 5:50 AM: THUNK THUNK……THUNK THUNK THUNK…………..THUNK THUNK…..THUNK……rattle rattle……THUNK THUNK…..THUNKTHUNK! The neighbor apparently decided today was the ideal day to break through the concrete wall of his apartment with a sledgehammer to run a new electrical outlet or some other such nonsense. Yes, before 6 in the morning. Yes, it’s still dark out. This is crazy even by Ukrainian standards. I got back to sleep long enough to have some disturbing but now forgotten dream about operational process related to equipment delivery, and woke up in a cold sweat. Am I really hardwired to dream […]

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