Recovery

Day 3 – Tuesday, 15 December

The sun shone brightly through the window as we awoke and glanced at a clock…11:30! Clearly, Tuesday dawned very late for us. But knowing that we had no obligations for the day, we tried to relax and use the time to recover from the trip. Neither of us had slept too well; we had forgotten that we are soft Americans used to our soft beds and squishy pillows…Add to that the stress of losing our luggage, Mark’s phone and iPod, and not being able to plug in any of our other electronics and charge them, and I was a bit of a basket case.

We had a bite to eat and called our translator to make sure there were no plans for the day. She confirmed that our driver did indeed have Mark’s iPhone and iPod, and would bring it to us tomorrow! Relieved a little bit, we decided to take a walk and try to find the grocery store. About 1:30, we bundled up in about 8 layers of clothes (ok, more like 3, plus coats) and started out of the apartment.

At this point, it’s important to note that our apartment is on the 8th floor of an old Soviet-style apartment building, in a huge complex of apartment buildings that look identical. I exited the building with fear and trepidation…I was certain we would never find our way home again! Our translator had told us to take the narrow road perpendicular to our building, and just follow it all the way out to the main street…but it was not quite that simple. We made notes of landmarks and took photos of our building, especially noting the unique blinds in the windows of the apartment next to the front door, but these steps did little to calm my anxiety!

We easily found the main street, and noticed a very long building across the street. It looked relatively new, but very plain. We started in the direction we thought to be the grocery store, but as I looked through a narrow glass door of the long building, I thought I saw a mobile phone store. Mark and I decided to look in and see if we could pick up an inexpensive replacement phone.

As we walked in, we realized that we had stumbled on a real, modern Ukrainian shopping mall! The young man at the phone store was most helpful despite a lack of English…my Russian crept back enough to communicate what we needed, and not only did we get a great little phone for about $40, but he also had a power adapter! With one quick stop, we solved two more problems that were totally stressing me out! A bit calmer, we wandered around the warm mall for an hour or so, noticing high-end Ukrainian stores mingled with Western stores, including Benneton, Timberland, and even an Apple store (called iStore here)! We also found a bookstore where we were able to pick up three of the four Twilight books in Ukrainian for Lena.

We then walked down the street and discovered the grocery store that we had been to the night before. Things here are well-suited for pedestrians, and we found it was actually easier to walk there to than to drive, albeit much colder! We picked up a few more groceries to carry us through Thursday, and then headed back to the apartment. Mark thought there should be a shortcut through the apartment complex, and so, despite my total fear of never finding our way back home, I put my faith in logic and my sense of direction, and we set off. A few minutes later, after zig-zagging through the complex, and trying to continue heading in the right general direction, we spotted our building! As we approached the door, our phone rang, and we learned that our luggage had been found and would be delivered to us later in the evening! Two more unnecessary sources of anxiety down!

We sautéed some chicken with onions, boiled some potato and mushroom vereneki (similar to perogies, only a little smaller). Before we left home, we loaded several seasons of a wide variety of TV shows on an external hard drive and brought a pile of DVDs so we would have plenty of entertainment; we watched a couple episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm as we anxiously awaited our luggage delivery. It finally arrived around 10:00 PM…Seems the delivery driver had the same challenges with finding our apartment as I did! But we showered and went to bed feeling MUCH more peaceful than we had the night before. Our missing items are recovered, our bodies are recovering, and we are ready for the first formal step in the adoption process tomorrow morning!