Gratitude

We would like to express our profound gratitude to family, friends, and especially our fabulous children, for your love, support, communication, and understanding as we proceed on this adventure. We’re happy when we hear that you read these words, happier to hear directly from you of your own news, and happier still to imagine the various gatherings, celebrations, and performances that occur in our absence, though we often ache to be there. We can almost taste the tangerine martinis being sipped on the front porch with Lake Washington and Mt Rainier in the background.

More Cultural Moments

• We’ve eaten more different chicken parts here than ever before, but the most unusual food we were served, which was gamely consumed by Peter, was pig’s ear, marinated with salt, pepper and garlic. Crunching on the cartilage, he said it tasted more like nose than ear.
• Mayonnaise is the favorite salad dressing of Ukrainians. It is also widely used as a garnish, as a dip, as a topping on just about anything you can imagine, and some things you can’t.
• It is fashionable for men to shave under their arms.
• The largest grocery store sections are those for cooking oil and for vodka.
• It is exceedingly rare to experience good customer service.
• Sidewalk entrepreneurs take a regular household scale, cover it with plastic, and set it out next to a handmade sign advertising, “Your weight for 50 kopeks,” about 10 cents. (Yesterday a price war began: your weight for 25 kopeks.)
• Ukrainians have a lovely tradition at birthday dinners. Everyone in attendance at the dinner table is expected to make a toast to the birthday celebrant. Not just a quick “to your health,” but at least a paragraph of eloquent compliments and good wishes, and even some of the youngest do it. They occur for the duration of dinner, and all hold up their shots of vodka while the toast is made, then clink their glasses all around before bottoms up.
• At every museum we’ve visited, each room of the museum has a person attending it, who turns on the lights in that room before we arrive, and turns them off as soon as we leave to go to the next room.
• We can count on one hand the number of racial minorities we’ve seen in Ukraine. If we don’t count Americans, it’s no more than two.
• There are essentially no English language newspapers or magazines here. It’s rumored that the New York Times can be found in Kiev, but there’s nothing in English in the two cities in which we have now lived.
• Our eyes tend to focus at our feet as we walk – to watch for the ubiquitous uneven sidewalks, big gaps in the asphalt, and uncovered manholes.
• So far our favorite name for a local enterprise is the “BrokeBusinessBank.”

Bye for now.