Saturday morning we headed to Dnepro and I took some photos as we drove so there's a little peek at transportation in Ukraine, in the second post. As you can see the around freezing with some snow weather has stuck with us this week, Centralna (our street in the village) was snow covered for the weekend. Yes, that is a motorcycle with a sidecar coming up the street toward us.
We went bowling, I have to say I beat Garry in the first game, 134 to 130, picking up a spare in the last frame to go ahead, but of course he won the rest of the games! We bowl so often that the guy put our names up on the screen in Russian before we got to our lane. We also picked up some welding rods for Maxim, he has had to do a lot of welding on the bucket of the neighbor's payloader, not just weld on the new part they got but fill in around them where there is a gap of an inch or so! Mostly we had to go to pick up the empty milk jugs from Victor's house, from the Thursday milk sales, so we could bring them back full the next day.
Sunday it was foggy as we drove out, but sunny before we got to Dnepro. After church we stopped at the Dafi mall to have lunch and pick up a few groceries and it was packed. There was some kind of craft sale upstairs and a lot of children and adults checking out a large rubbery moving and roaring dinosaur stuffed in the space next to the escalator downstairs, two more were at either end of the movie theatre area upstairs, they were maybe five feet tall and 8 feet long, and people were taking photos with them.
Monday Garry and Maxim did not start work on the barn- Maxim has pointed out its like a no work week anyway with all the holidays, Thursday is International Womens Day which is like the biggest holiday of the year here in Ukraine- there are billboards all over the city with politicians congratulating women on the 8th of March or ads for stuff to buy them for the 8th of March, we bought big boxes of candy for the ladies that milk while shopping on Sunday. Its like crossing Valentines and Mothers Day at home. They actually had classes at the village school on Saturday so everyone can have a four day weekend this week, taking this Friday off after the Thursday holiday.
Instead the guys drove to Vilinus to look at a cultivator for sale in the morning. This is a city south of us, it takes maybe an hour and half to get there, we always drive through it on the way to Crimea, it's most memorable landmark is a police station in a traffic circle that looks like a spaceship has landed there. Anyway, they finally got there, phoned the guy to ask exactly where he was located, and found out he was in Vilinus in the the Kharcov oblast (region) while they were in the city of the same name in the Zaporhosia oblast. They did check out some other cultivators and we need to purchase a new baler this spring also, so they didn't waste the whole morning.
The guy in Vilinus is emailing them photos of his cultivator for sale. This morning - Tuesday- they are off to check out equipment at the dealer in Bratski (its on the way to Dnepro.) Last year they borrowed a cultivator to work up the fields, spend a lot of time and a couple hundred dollars fixing it, so this year they are looking to buy at used one, so at least when they are done fixing it they will have something good to use.
Yesterday afternoon we drove to Dnepro again to Tanya's class to be the examiner's for two of her classes oral tests, we get to ask the students a set of questions, and answer ones from them in English and write down what level ability they have, it's a tough job. Of course we got lovely presents, a yummy cake and I got three lovely tulips for women's day. They are in the vase now, the roses had hung their heads down over the weekend.
Garry and Max were back before 11 am this morning as they had a meeting with two men from a company about producing the free stalls for the new barn, they met in the living room discussing sizes types and materials in a mixture of English and Russian. I had put dinner in the oven before they arrived, since I was unsure how thawed my "eggplant casserole" was, I had got it out of the freezer while making yesterday's dinner. We are eating from the garden still, I sliced, dipped in egg and flour and fried the pieces (it's actually squash, not eggplant) last summer when we had a bounty of it, then packed four plastic boxes full with layers of cheese and tomato sauce, now there's only one more left in the freezer. It's a little tough, I think we'll grow less squash this summer. We are also having a bag of frozen corn, I still have lots of beans, salsa and jam in the freezer, since I had put vegetables from the garden in the freezer thinking that Seth and Jonah would be eating them in the fall, anyway.
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