Okay, this is the final bit from Ukraine before I start sending Istanbul and Athens emails. Forgive the post-dating. I wrote yesterday, but had a complete meltdown with all the goodbyes scheduled into my day that I didn’t send. As I write, I am surrounded by all manner of hostile Ukrainian electric devices. The water-boiler […]
Will catch up on back-dated posts — they’re saved, just waiting to be posted — after I leave, but for now, I can share my new travel plans. Visas for Russia take up to a month unless you pay large fees, and it’s probably not the best idea to be an American women traveling alone […]
June 21 was Thursday, right? We had our last round of groups. It wasn’t until then that I realized that the groups from Wednesday had been half from Chernobyl, meaning we’d been very near Chernobyl. You’d think I would have known earlier, but the process is mysterious. We pile into a van, drive for five […]
Driving in Ukraine is an adventure. We were lucky enough to have seatbelts in the third row of the surprisingly new VW van, a brilliant silver, that we took today to the focus groups in the town that sounded like a bad infection of some type. (“Smila”?) Unfortunately the seatbelts were more temperamental than Cher […]
Okay, so, Day 3 through 6 – let me see if I can remember what I even did. In general terms, I can certainly offer a bit in the way of what an adventure it is to go to Ukranian restaurants. Step 1, and don’t underestimate the difficulty, locate a restaurant that is neither simply […]
My plane was an hour and a half late getting in to Frankfurt. Not just any hour and a half, but an additional hour and a half spent next to two small children whose parents couldn’t be bothered to sit with them and instead placed them next to me while they sat in the row […]
So I leave for California on Wednesday at 6 am — necessitating a 3 am drive to Baltimore — and I’ll come back for a single day before leaving for three weeks.