It's 5 am and we are checked through and sitting in the departure area at Borispol airport (Kiev) and there is free Internet! The plane will board in an hour or so, so I have time for a blog post since I charged the battery back up last night at the Porters apartment. Asparrow is hopping around under the next row of seats, I guess they have gotten into the new terminal F now, we used to watch them fly around in terminal b.
Garry was busy before we left with meetings about his new project with the dairy for the trade school. looks like they have hit another bump in the road as far as getting the old dairy barns at the old collective. He opened the first tube of brewers grain and it looks good to feed- in fact they are feeding it now and will be selling it as soon as the last pit is empty. Garry put up the tubes for the holidays since they quit making beer around December 20th and so there is no brewers grain to buy until sometime in the New Year. Garry says we have 4 months in the tubes at the current rate of use (including what we are selling to people in the village.) We had to raise the price when the cost went up recently, but we are selling more than before. This may be explained by a recent new customer telling Maxim that the guy they bought from before has raised his price to 4X ours.
We went bowling on Tuesday with Victor, who said he had bowled once before, the first game he almost beat my score, I was finally over 100 on the third game where we only got in 7 frames. Took me a while to warm up- Garry was bowling well the the whole time, and Victor got a few strikes.
Afterwards they decided to go buy two new pulsators for the milking machines. You may remember Garry upgraded the the pulsators when he bought two more machines in July. So now the four 100 dollar pulsators have been replaced by the two old ones, they had put back on earlier and two new 6 dollar pulsators. The fancy ones did not shut the vacuum off all the way when they were supposed to be resting, which was a problem- it works on/off so the milk goes into the bucket but the cows udder gets a chance to rest so the blood can move in and out of the teats while milking. Turned out the simple ones made in Ukraine do a better job.
Wednesday evening we attended the ballet in Dnepropetroesk and took Maxim and his girlfriend Yulia with us to see a Ukrainian ballet, The Night before Christmas, the story has young lovers, a witch, a priest, a devil, some Cossacks, the Empress - Catherine I think- and a lot of pretend skating on the pond. The company is off to tour it in China for a couple weeks. Everyone enjoyed it and there was nearly a full house, since it only had one showing before going on tour.
We got home about ten pm, and Garry had to go to the barn and breed two cows before packing his carry-on bag. I had packed the big suitcases the week before since most of the stuff in them belongs to Seth and Jonah, they were sitting by the bedroom door waiting to go out when we got up at 4 am to go to the train station.
We waved goodbye to Max in front of the train station- he was driving the car back to the village, and sat in the grand waiting room for a while before we could get on our train. It pulled out of the station at 6:30 and we read, chatted and tried to nap on the six hour ride. Looking out the window made you queasy since we happened to have seats facing the middle of the car, which is sort of like sitting in the backwards facing rear seat of the old station wagon! Mostly you just see trees, and the occasional village, railroad crossing guard house or maybe city anyway.
WE arrived in Kiev about 12:30 and carrying all the luggage up about three flights of stairs was exhausting! We had originally planned to store the luggage there and do a little sightseeing before heading over to Daryl and Molly's apartment for the night. Since I had forgotten to write down the directions to their place from the METRO stop, we stopped at the cafe there since it promised wifi so I could copy it off the email. Garry had some chicken and veggies and I had a bowl of soup before we tucked the computer case away in one of the big suitcases. Garry had found the luggage storage after we arrived while I rested up at the top of the stairs...er watched the luggage.
After carting the stuff down one flight of stairs, we decided this is crazy, let's just get on the METRO and take the subway over toward the apartment, which is what we did, sucessfully switching lines and getting all our stuff onto the trains- we even got to sit down on the second subway car. Nere's the view of the stairs we carried the luggage up out of the METRO, before pulling it over to the McDonalds. Check out the handicapped ramp on the stairs with the baby carriage going up it.
We hung out at Mc Donalds with our 2 suitcases, and three carry-ons- first outside by the playstructure and inside as it got dark (and colder) until they met us after their Russian lesson to take a bus to the apartment.
Molly made some tasty taco salad for dinner, and we played a game before heading to bed. We had ordered a taxi for 4 am, which got us to the airport in plenty of time to get through the check-in, and into the upstairs waiting room. Garry tried to take a nap, while I started this blog post (accidently pushed publish when Garry wanted to check out the Eagles game online before we got on the plane to Amsterdam- which is why its now longer, proofread and has photos!)
I'll put up some photos later but we did make it to the Winnipeg airport about 20 hours later.
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