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Winter
Travel
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Winter
Travel
February 22 (started - finished a week later. Flexible deadline)
Hi Friends and Relatives,
We've not written generally in about a month so here goes. We're still here. We still miss the people back home but we have to admit we're feeling more and more at home here too. It's strange because we still don't speak the language and the weather has not improved (see below). Maybe it's just loss of short-term memory and we've forgotten what Home Depot really looks like.
Anyway, the themes for this column are weather and country drives. In the next message we'll talk about our recent visitor.
A couple weeks ago, the Kyvian weather gods threw a new wrinkle at us - fog. The view from my office gives a clue. On the day before I took this picture, my office mate Peter was scheduled to fly back from Frankfurt. His plane descended toward the airport but they never saw a thing. At some point the pilot decided to live another day and they zoomed off into the sky. Peter then got a free 3 hour flight to Romania for fuel, several hours of waiting at Bucharest International (not to be missed) and then a return flight to Frankfurt when Lufthansa finally gave up. So, he travelled for 12 hours and got nowhere. The next day things cleared up enough for normal operation -- "cleared up" is a relative term as the picture from my 8th floor office may indicate.
Meanwhile, back at a more human level, we've gone through a period of ice. Some of the ice comes from roof drains and builds up into glaciers. We've learned that the worst weather is days-above-freezing, nights-below-freezing. These drain pipes empty onto the sidewalk every 20 feet and the ice builds at night and spreads in the day. The other feature of the melt-now, freeze-later plan is that some places get absolutely coved with the stuff like the plaza next to us. This is an ice sheet exactly in front of one of the biggest tourist attractions in town. No wonder we have a problem with repeat tourists.
But people get along despite the ice and snow. While Peter was still home in Germany, I had to go up to Slavutych. On a good day, it's a two hour boring drive. On this particular day, there was considerable snow on the road, despite the best effort of snowplows. Make that snow plow (singular). It's the only one I've ever seen out on the highways. Anyway, at one point the driver got just a teensiest bit sideways on a curve. Sliding toward a bus. Next thing I know we do a pair of 360 degree spins and end up off the road but unhurt - and right side up. I was certain we would either hit the bus or roll the car off the elevated roadbed we started on. All we had to do was push the dented car out of the snow bank. Of course there's significant cosmetic damage but the car was three weeks old so it was time to break it in.
When I got up to the plant town of Slavutych, I had a normal series of boring engineering meetings. There are lots of "Westerners" to talk with so that's always good. It keeps my English in good shape. Otherwise I'd revert to simple sentences only. Like these.
Anyway, I had a few minutes after the meeting to walk around the town. It was a standard winter day but here were a bunch of school kids running around the track and exercising. I guess if winter is six months long you just have to ignore it.
The drive back was uneventful. We did stop to buy some apples from the ladies that sit all day along the side of the road. This is another reminder that, whatever we do for a living, there are harder ways to survive.
Stay tuned for the next installment: a visitor!
Remember, we like to hear from you too.
Regards,
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Originally mailed February 22, 1999. Reformatted June 2, 2001. This page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.