We laughed at the scandal of the sign telling the reporter not to flush the toilet paper... has no one been to a former USSR country before? You really do not flush the toilet paper unless told it's OK to - hotels and apartments over five stories generally are good to flush but private homes and other buildings, if there isn't a sign, look for the waste basket right next to the toilet, it is there for your used TP. If the plumbing plugs up from the paper I am told, they have to jackhammer the cement to get to the plumbing for the system... maybe just a "not working" sign will get hung up, if you can read it.
The don't flush the toilet paper was one of the first things we learned the first summer we came to Ukraine, and carry your own toilet paper is a good idea too, public places don't always have it, unless you pay for a piece, and real Ukrainian toilet paper is rather like brown crepe paper you rip off a roll (no perforations) but the fluffier many colored kind you are more familiar with is widely sold and as popular it seems now. The first summer teaching English, I discovered what people do when they don't have any toilet paper on them when I found one of my English lesson handouts had been put to to a different use in the ladies' room waste paper basket.
I found this photo on a Ukrainian site, of a sign explaining how to use a toilet properly, for those used to the old style we call "squatties" because that is what you do to use them. The center left is a good idea, when I am happy to find a western style toilet in a public restroom I always check for footprints on the toilet seat.
Some of the other things on the news sound like bad Russian to English translations.... like "water dangerous for on face", it could just mean don't drink the tap water, which is pretty standard for foreigners anyway! Try some menus translated into English for more fun, if there are any available that is, sometimes it can be almost as hard to figure out as if it was in Russian! I still remember the "ironed" dish on one menu, which was I assumed "pressed?"
We are looking forward to watching the Olympics on television this time, although we will miss the opening ceremonies because we will be doing Garry's English discussion group in Dnepropetroesk when it is on live (and we need to pay the satellite bill today on one of the machines in the city, we were going to do it on Wednsesday but Garry needs to put all the numbers for the phones, internet, and the satellite on a new card for his new wallet, since that was in his wallet that was stolen in December in Kiev)We did not see much of the last winter games in Vancouver because we did not have the Eurosport channel we have on the satellite then, we only had the free to air channels then. Garry had hoped that we could go to Sochi, because there was a rumor that visas to Russia would not be needed for the Olympics, but that did not happen and the price of tickets for the semi and gold medal hockey games is amazingly high when he looked online. We can have fun rooting for three different countries' athletes!
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