The seven day itch

Today was the seventh day of the seven day itch.

No, dirty minds, I don't go through a new bloke every week.

Heating in Ukraine is an interesting concept. The city (i.e. council) heats our apartment. In fact, the city heats most of the apartments in Kyiv. It's turned on in October, and turned off in March.

All day, every day, our apartment is heated to a balmy 21.5 degrees. I can't turn it down, and I can't turn it off. That's just the way life is. As tenants, we don't even have to pay for it.

The problem is, when a cold snap comes, the heat goes mad. For the past week, I've been sweating out the cold snap (when I'm not freezing, of course) in 25 degree heat, because the city has shovelled a little too much coal into the furnace. The inevitable result is that I'm constantly dehydrated. And really bloody itchy.

This morning, after a rather sleepless 25 degree night*, I woke up and surveyed the damage. I've sweated through two sets of pyjamas this week, I have a heat rash on my arms, I've scratched off skin on my shins, and I have bruises around my knees from my ferocious scratching.

Of course, it doesn't help that I insist on sleeping under a doona (duvet, quilt, whatever). I can't sleep any other way.

In Australia, Mr Moi and I never owned a heater. On those 10 degree winter nights in Sydney (it does happen), we watched telly with crocheted granny rugs on our laps. When things got really bad, we'd be in bed at 7pm watching telly from underneath the doonas.

This heating thing, with no open windows and no moisture in the air, is new to us.

I know you're thinking, "Well, why don't you just buy some moisturiser? Surely this would be the cure for the seven day itch?"

Well, the truth is, I tried. I really did. But it was so confusing looking at all the Russian labels on the shelf, that I just gave up. I didn't want to buy something for oily skin when I have dry skin. My hormone balance, in general, is erratic enough, without messing with the pH balance of my largest organ. (Ohh. On proof read, that sounds a bit dirty. But I'll remind readers that I'm a girl).

Secretly, being itchy made me feel a bit tough. It's like 'tough', at a discount. I thought I could tough it out.

Except, the cold has finally caught up with the heat, and apartment has now dropped to about 15 degrees. As a result, I have three jumpers on and am sitting under a doona. And the confined dry heat is making me itchier than ever.



* Many women in Ukraine are very beautiful. Now, Mr Moi has never given me reason to think that he even looks at other women - I've never seen him do it, and if I comment on a stunner who's just walked past, he's totally oblivious.

Regardless, last night I had a dream that he met a lovely beautiful girl and I caught him talking to her. Then, at 3am this morning, he woke me up saying, "Little Miss Babe, have you seen my wedding ring? It's fallen off, I can't find it!" Half asleep, I patted the sheets and my pillow, to no avail.

When I woke up this morning, I found his wedding ring clutched in my hand under the pillow. I have a suspicion that, when he cheated on me in my dreams, I grabbed his hand and yanked off his wedding ring. And, in case you're wondering, I did give him the silent treatment for cheating on me in my dreams.

See? I'm a tough bird.

You know it's time to wear your thermals when...

On Wednesday, the temperature in Kyiv dropped. Quite significantly, in fact - it was around minus 15 in the morning, and warmed up to around minus seven.

And the sun was out. As a result, I seriously underestimated just how cold it was outside.

Setting out for lunch, I donned a pair of trusty knee socks under my lined boots. No tights, no thermals. Just a cotton summer skirt, boots and socks (oh, and a shirt and jumper of course).

Not having far to go to meet my friends, I didn't really notice the cold. But after lunch, a friend asked me to walk with her to find a sports hall she'd been told about.

So we set out on foot, up from the valley that is Kreshchatyk to the hill-top of the river bank. The wind was blowing mighty fiercely at the top of the hill and it was bloody freezing.

Admittedly, we were both rather cold, but as we were on foot, we just sped up a little to keep warm. We walked around for about an hour, then returned to Kreshchatyk. That's where I saw something I've never seen before.

A Ukrainian man smiled at me. Almost laughed. I was dumbfounded, this was such a monumental event. Ukrainians never smile and make eye contact on the street. What was going on? Have the tides turned?

Then he looked at my knees. I followed his gaze and looked down.

My knees were fluorescent pink. They were brighter than the worst sunburn I have ever had if my life. In contrast to my black boots and black skirt, this painful streak of freezing pink flesh was shocking.

I was so embarrassed. I undid my zip just a little so I could pull my skirt lower to hide the pink. I felt as though people were looking at me, thinking, "What a stupid foreign lady. She doesn't even know how to keep warm."

I scurried home, and pulled out the thermals straight away, so I wouldn't forget to put them on when I went out on Thursday. Then I spent the rest of the evening defrosting.

So while it's not as interesting or inventive as some of the competition entries, I discovered: you know it's time to wear your thermals when your legs are so pink, they force a Kyivite to smile at you.

Do you want Little Miss Moi to write a haiku in your honour?

Simply compete in today's reader competition!


You know it's time to wear your thermals when....?

(Hint: it has something to do with the cold)

(Yes, there is a story behind this, but you have to work for it kids!)


Terms and conditions.
All educated (and not-so-educated) guesses are welcome. The winner of the competition will be announced tomorrow. The prize is a haiku written by moi in your honour. Winning criteria is completely arbitrary. I reserve the right to write crap poetry.

The terrific Taras Shevchenko tour

Today was a beautiful day. So I will try not to be cynical.

To celebrate this beautiful day, Mr Moi and I nursed our mini-Caribbean-Club hangovers from the comfort of our couch, and looked at the beautiful day every now and then (basically, when we were game enough to expose our eyeballs to sunlight).

But, as fate would have it, I had agreed to babysit the kids of a couple we know. After a bolstering meal of chinese instant noodles, we set out in the crisp minus 3 air, and walked to our friends' house.

I took the point-and-shoot with me to capture the fleeting afternoon. And it wasn't until I downloaded these photos that I realised I've documented the terrific Taras Shevchenko tour.

Taras Shevchenko is a Ukrainian literary hero (not to be mistaken with Andriy Shevchenko, who is a Ukrainian soccer hero. And unlike Taras, he's still alive).

Walking to the end of our street, Mr Moi and I had to cut through Taras Shevchenko park.

Most of the snow on roads and paths recently melted, and has since been followed by a cold snap. So there's still snow on the grass, but not on the paths. This makes walking a pleasure, and despite there not being any other people in this photo besides Mr Moi, there really were a few people out and about.

The sun was actually shining through the trees, which I thought looked rather pretty, and not a little endearing.

As we walked through Taras Shevchenko Park, I couldn't help but notice Taras Shevchenko University. It's the big red building you see in the background.

There's a story behind the colour of the university - I think some young bolsheviks were protesting against the Tsars, so Nikolai II ordered them to be killed. They happened to be students at the university, who were protesting at the university. So, to remind the public of the bloodshed, Nikolai ordered that the building be painted red.

If that's not enough Taras Shevchenko for you, then here's the main man himself. Everyday, he keeps watch over his park and his university.

Unfortunately, because of the way his statue is positioned, he can't keep watch over his boulevard.

This is Bulvar Taras Shevchenko.

Well, part of it. It's actually quite long, and lined with poplar trees. I'm looking forward to seeing it in the summer.

Walking down Bulvar Taras Shevchenko on a Sunday night, as we were, we could hear the bells of Volodomyrsky ringing.

This old church is still operating as a Russian Orthodox church. The bells were calling people to church, I guess, and unlike other bells you see around the place, they were being rung by humans.

I love the blue domes with the gold stars painted on. Even religious people must be three year old kids deep down.

Kyiv, as with all former soviet countries, is full of underpasses. Because the driving is so bad, and humans act as something to target rather than dodge, the soviets wisely built a lot of underpasses around the cities.

This is one of them. It's also an entry to the Universityet metro station, one of the deepest in the world.
The sun is running out, so here are a couple of last ditch shots to capture the prettiness of the day.


And finally, here's what brings me back to earth: garbage piled high right on the footpath of one of the city's flagship streets.

And here's one of the trams from the 1940s that hopefully will get replaced by a Swiss-issue 'new'* tram.
I hope you enjoyed these colour photos from Kyiv.


*old

A cold and the cold, and more on Simon & Garkfunkel

A wise friend in Kyiv told me yesterday, "Be careful if you're sick. Every new country is a new bug."

I've developed a cold. I've never been concerned about colds in my life. They didn't inhibit my lifestyle in anyway: you don't worry when it's a 20 degree winter day and you have a trifling runny nose.

But now I understand what it's like to have a cold, in the cold. You can't be bothered doing anything. In fact, I took a 'day off' today and slept. Never mind that my 'day off' is simply opting out of the Monday Morning Coffee/gossip fest.

And so, because of this cold, today's unentertaining post draws to a close... But one thing further.

It seems that my post the other day has brought a few S&G fans out of the closet. The band really does have universal appeal, and I think between the S&G back-catalogue and the Paul Simon solo one, there's almost a song for every mood (and every movie).

For the record: I do love '59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)'; it earned a couple of extra brownie points after the wedding. While it's not my favourite, it's probably their only non-slit-yer-wrists song, so we deemed it suitable for the wedding.

So to continue the conversation... Introducing:

The Very Predictable Little Miss Moi Top 10 Simon & Garfunkel
(in no particular order and subject to weekly change)

• Scarborough Fair/Canticle (love that it's sung in round)
• For Emily, Wherever I may Find Her
• Wednesday Morning, 3AM (and I like the use of same lyrics in 'Somewhere They Can't Find Me')
• The Boxer (like the sax)
• Richard Cory and A Most Peculiar Man (I always associate these with one another, so they're listed together)
• 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
• The Dangling Conversation (I like the harp)
• A Poem for the Underground
• A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or how I was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)
• Leaves that are Green

Any errors, oversights, omissions, etc?

Just so you know. I do listen to other music.

Slip slidin' away...

My first love was Simon & Garfunkel. To the extent that, when I walked down the aisle to get hitched, I did it to 'The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)'.

My theme song for this week is 'Slip Sliding Away'. This song plays in my head every time I'm outside, negotiating ground covered in black ice. With enough snow hanging around to melt during the day then freeze, it makes for some entertaining walking along the footpath.

On Sunday, I went to get milk from a shop about 300 metres away. The return journey took half an hour, as I was walking so gingerly over the ice. As I returned to my building, I was hip-hip-hooraying the expedition survival. Only to then slip on a patch of ice on my doorstep...

The other hazard of being out at this drippy time of year is melting ice/snow falling on you from above. Walking along a street yesterday, I heard a crack and a split second later, something hit my head and I was covered with ice.

It was more embarrassing than painful. The incident was witnessed by two fat Ukrainian men who insisted on pissing themselves laughing, coming right up to my face to do so. When I laughed 'har har har' back at them, they said in broken English, "Funny! Very funny!"

Imagine my fate had the ice been a pointy stalactite. At least I would have had something to extract and brandish at the pompous laughers.

DAMMIT!

Another blog post down the drain. All because I tried to select all with ctrl-A. It's 11:30pm and I was cranky and tired anyway, and now I'm even more cranky and tired.

Today I went on a 'ladies who lunch' tour to a Babi Yar memorial for the 37,000 Jews who were murdered over a two-day period during WWII, and St Cyril's Monastery, which is an old, Kiev Rus period church with great artwork inside.

I know the following reasons don't really justify my crankiness, especially considering I went to a very sobering memorial for tens of thousands of murdered Jews and a church that was ruined by atheist-Soviets. But to sum up why I became cranky and tired:

• Was late to the rendezvous point by 10 minutes because the buses and taxis wouldn't stop for me
• Once with the group, we caught a zillion marshrutkas to get to St Cyril's, I'm not kidding. I hate those suspension-free-zone minivans
• My toes froze about three times. I'm surprised they are still on my feet
• I had two cameras. One of them is big and heavy and a pain to carry around. For most of the day, neither of them would work
• After you have dwelt on the injustice of the previous point, imagine my annoyance when it turned out neither would work as a result of my own stupidity. One camera didn't have a battery in it. The other has a dead battery, and the spare was in the wrong place so I couldn't find it for the majority of the day
• Got yelled at by a trolleybus full of Ukrainians for getting off at the wrong stop
• After all of this, I had to go to the supermarket and purchase about 30kgs of groceries which I carried home on my back.

Add to the mix freezing cold temperatures - it was minus nine, and about minus 20 windchill. The final straw was blogger mysteriously deleting my long and descriptive blog post.

Grrr. Well, I've just finished taking out the double-spacing blogger inserted into this post when I uploaded the pics. It's time to go to bed.

How was your day?

I fell off the (daily blogging) wagon

I was seeking some creative inspiration for the blog yesterday afternoon so when Mr_Moi suggested we head to the nearby Arena Bar for an aperitif, I agreed wholeheartedly.

Trudging through the snow, we arrived there at about 5:30pm, and we ordered a beer (500mL cloudy something-or-other that was brewed in the premises), and some sausages from the aptly named "Meals for Beer" menu.

After working non-stop all weekend, Mr_Moi was keen to have a couple of beers and go; in his words, "Early out and about, early home". But so engaging was our general chit chat that it eventually led to another beer, which lead to us philosophising about how darn perfect we are, another beer, and strategising how we can make the world as perfect as us.

Five hours and five beers each later, we asked for the bill (in my by then perfectly fluent Russian, which they totally comprehended), went home via McDonald's (the sausages weren't enough), and, with some more philosophising about the 'international language of fast food', skated home on the snow like loud obnoxious foreigners.

The only thing we didn't theorise a solution for was: what does 'democratic pricing' mean?

The slush has arrived

Today has been a rather uneventful day, so I've had time to reflect on the snows that finally hit yesterday (but were almost melted by today).

Yesterday I woke up to the sound of cars driving along a wet road. What with winter being so late this year, I really believed it would never come, so when I checked out the 'rain' and saw that it was 'snow', I was actually shocked.

It seems that winter may have finally come to Kyiv. Unfortunately, it was so long in coming that the people who are employed in winter-orientated occupations seem to have left town. There were no babushkas out sweeping the paths at the crack of dawn (8am), and very few snowploughs on the roads.

Throw into the mix above-freezing temperatures by mid-morning, and it was almost time to go swimming.

As you can see, there's there's a bit of slush on the roads, and with the Ukrainian tendency to park on the footpath, it's hard to distinguish where the road ends and the footpath begins. The hilarity of twisted ankles and a big a-over-t stack ensues. Not me personally, of course.

As I earlier mentioned, most of the snow had melted by this afternoon but the days are still short, so most flat surfaces in town didn't see the sunlight today. They're still very wet, and tomorrow the temps are dropping below zero for a few days. I'll have to pull out the ice-skates.

This is a Clayton's post

I would like to dedicate this post to my little brother, Clayton. He was named after the non-alcoholic spirit, Clayton's: The drink you have when you're not having a drink. Being born six years after the four other well-spaced kids in the family, my parents deemed him the baby you have when you're not having any more babies. Growing up with this stigma, it's a wonder he turned out normal.

This is a pic I took of myself in London's Regent's Park in September. In many ways, the weather pattern we experienced there was one I've experienced here: unseasonably warm, lots of flowers where there should be dead foliage, and people out and about, making the most of the weather. Of course, one major difference between London in September and Kyiv in January is that the sun was out.

I look at these photos from time to time when I need to remember what a shadow is.

So why is this a Clayton's post? Two reasons:

1) I want to put a pic on my profile without using the crappy Hello software recommended by blogger. That software just does not work for me. I have circumvented the need to use the software by posting this, and using the URL from the pic above to put a pic of me in the profile section. So darn smart of me.

2) This post has nothing to do with anything. It's the post you post when you're not posting a post.


POST SCRIPT:
I am a bit concerned on reading the Wikipedia entry on Claytons, that my readers will think I am an unloving daughter and older sister. One of the definitions given for Claytons on Wikipedia is:

... Subsequently, the term "Claytons" entered the vocabulary of both countries [Australia and New Zealand], used as an adjective to signify a compromise which satisfies no-one, or any form of inferior substitute or low-quality imitation, largely synonymous with the word "ersatz". For example, a hasty or temporary repair may be only a Claytons solution to a problem.

I would like to point out that I'm not trying to make a commentary on my parents' decision to have another child after they reached perfection (Little_Miss_Moi). Simply make reference to the second definition provided on the page.

Will the real shoe fetishist please stand up?

I am in a state of heightened concern.

I was just looking at my flickr page and was alarmed to see that the photo of my bew-di-ful legs with their fur-lined boots has been viewed 43 times?! I mean, I know the sight of my legs is enough to set hearts racing, but 43 times viewed is a little alarming compared with an average of six views per every other picture.

All I can say is that I'm scared. Is someone stalking me on the net? Is a so-called 'friend' to whom I emailed my flickr link really a sordid recruiter/spy for a criminal shoe-fetishist ring? Are my precious pins going to turn up on websites that, if they were a phone number, would start with 1800 and end with XXX? And only be advertised after midnight on channel 10?

All I can say to you, Mr/s Shoe Fetishist, is that I'm a humble, unemployed young lady. If you're making money off my legs... I want a cut too.

(If you just happen to be reading this post, and are curious about my potentially money making legs, you can make an appraisal by looking at my flickr site here. But when you're making me an offer, just remember: I won't don my boots for less than $10,000 per day.)