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People
Pictures
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People
Pictures
March 27, 1999
Hello Again,
Here's the second message of the weekend &endash; the message with people pictures.
(The last message had to get divided in three parts and I think this one will get divided too. Our phone line is so poor that it's rare to keep an Internet connection for more than 10 or 15 minutes. And there is so much noise on the line that it's quite slow. The problem is compounded when one of the big messages doesn't go through because then they bounce back and we need a lot of time for the bounced message to come across the line &endash; just so we can throw them away. Sometime we'll get more sophisticated and just have a website. That way we'll just send an e-mail that says "look at our latest". Oh well, another project.)
Most our "people events" this month were related to our visitors. Both Gabby and Geoff came over for a week each. It was a lot of fun as we first did the tourist thing with Gabby and then with Geoff a week later.
GABBY
Gabby arrived on February 19 and there were smiles all around. She had been in Jerusalem for a week at a business conference so she was pretty worn out from travel. We let her sleep for Saturday but on Sunday we got in the car and drove (were driven actually) to the city of Chernihiv. (Pictures for that were on the first Diary.) It was a fun trip and we all got to see a more peaceful side of Ukraine than we have in the big city of Kyiv.
On Monday, Gabby went to school with her Mom. She was the big hit of the class and she found out just how small and "homelike" Kyiv International School (KIS) is. Of course Marianne only wanted to share the classroom (or the kid) for a limited time so she took a few days off to finish the Kyiv tour for Gabrielle.
One night we all went to the Opera House and saw a concert from the national "Bandura" orchestra. This is an instrument that is a blend of harp and guitar and forty of them on stage made for an interesting evening. Of course this also gave the girls a chance to wear furs. Gabby is wearing her grandmother's mink and it looked great &endash; despite what all the California tree-huggers might think.
The rest of the visit was spent shopping and talking ; touring and talking ; eating and talking and just talking. It was wonderful for mother and daughter to catch up. But I don't think this has decreased the phone traffic since.
GEOFF
After a boring and quiet week with just the two of us, Geoff arrived on a Spring Break trip. For this tourist, it was my turn. I enjoyed taking off each afternoon and doing something, including a lot of talking. Norwegian men don't talk as much as Hungarian women but we do all right.
We started out with a trip to the local market. That is snow you see. Geoff got a taste of our winter and how we try not to let it get in the way. If the market didn't sty open when it snowed, we'd all starve.
March 17 happened during this visit so here we are at O'Brian's Pub (really) celebrating. That's me, Geoff, Marianne and Galina &endash; a teacher and friend from Marianne's school. Galina hadn't done St. Paddy's before so this was our chance to broaden the knowledge of the local populace (the picture was being taken by Olga, another teacher-friend.)
One afternoon, Geoff and I went to tour the Lavra, a place with dozens of old churches and religious buildings. In soviet times it was a museum but for almost 900 years before that it was a religious center. There were caves with dead holy people (we saw them in their glass-covered coffins.) There was limited time but we did make it to the caves and ended climbing the large bell tower. Here's Geoff on step 120, halfway up. The view from the top was spectacular.
On the next afternoon, Geoff and I (and my driver Yurii) had a wonderful walk through the place where the Soviets had collected examples of typical peasant life throughout Ukraine. You probably saw some of the pictures in the first e-mail but here's Geoff inspecting an old thatched roof. This was another sign that the Good Old Days were probably the Good and Cold Days as well.
Unfortunately Geoff did have to go back to school. It was nice having "kids" around.
Our last picture is just Marianne and Galina doing some regular shopping. This particular market is a collection of shipping containers. The food they were selling actually looked pretty good and the dismal surroundings disappear after awhile. I think this means we're getting settled. (or numb?)
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Originally sent March 27, 1999. Reformatted June 3, 2001.
This page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.