Day 3
February 15th, 2007
It’s my third day here in Ukraine. After going to bed at 8:00PM local time I woke up around 3AM this morning. With nothing much to do I pulled out the laptop and watched a movie. And then I pulled out bittorrent and downloaded the latest episode of American Idol. And then I watched that. And then I stared at the dark wall wondering why the street light never came back on outside. And then… you see, it was more boring than reading this blog.
The two mornings I’ve been here I’ve woken up very early. On both days, before the sun rises but I’m not sure exactly what time, you can hear someone scraping or shoveling the sidewalk. It appears that they (the government?) clean the sidewalk daily in an attempt to keep the city clean. While walking in this morning I think I’ve discovered that this is very important. Were they not to do this the sidewalks would be littered with dog shit. I shit you not 
Apparently they don’t have the laws that require leashed dogs nor that whole pooper scooper thing.
When the sun finally rose I called Heather and talked to her for a bit before eating breakfast and showering. I walked into the office today and logged my journey with the GPS. You can see the trip here in Google maps. Unfortunately the satelite pictures suck and the roads aren’t listed at all there. According to the GPS stats its a 1.5mi walk and it took me right around 30 minutes, door to door, to do it (I turned the GPS on “near” my apt and off “near” lohika). It’s not that I walk slow but I think there are many times where you have to stop to not get killed by the crazy drivers here.
At lunch Yuriy took me to the local grocery store. From the outside the place is a huge, modern building; it looks like a 4-story mall. Turns out the grocery store is only the bottom floor and, though nice inside, its about the size of a Trader Joe’s. I picked up some food for dinner and this should help me to avoid feeling like a worthless slob trying to order dinner from a local restaurant.
The weather was pretty warm today and the sun even showed itself through broken clouds at one point today. I’d guess it got into the 40s. However, 40 degrees in CA just feels much warmer than 40 degrees in Ukraine. It just pierces through your clothes somehow.
I gave an english lesson to the UI dev team today. I defined the words “chit chat”, “dude”, “dude-ette” and “she-dude.” Engaging in casual conversation with a lot of these guys I can see their eyes glaze over just as mine do when folks start talking in Ukrainian. Talking slow and using common words seems to help.
Entry Filed under: Ukraine