Visit Vorzel with the Girls, Ice Cold Water

End of Day Seven

Another day, another visit.  Bill finally broke down and bought a $30 water filter.  I'm ashamed at how grateful I am for clean drinking water.  Details below....

So, I'm a little behind, but this is about right for me anyway.  Saturday morning, Bill looked at me with the eyes of a dead man and asked if I would take the girls to Vorzel and visit Ruslan so he could spend a morning at "home" with the boys.  Of course, I was in NO WAY prepared to do this.  Like I mentioned, I have been herding kids while he figured out the routes. But, I finally decided, if he could do it, so could I.  So, there I was about 7am on Saturday morning walking to the Metro with my precious little girls.  I was lost before we even left the Metro station.  We had to take the first train to an intersection of the Green Line and the Red Line.  Rather than just give the transfer station ONE NAME, it has TWO--one for the Green Line and one for the Red Line.  I was looking for the Red Line's title, forgetting that the Green Line will only take me to the Green title.  If this makes no sense to you then pat yourself on the back and Thank God, for you are an American.

In case you are wondering, we walk to the Lukyanivska (green) Metro station and take the Metro to the Zoloti Vorta (green) stop.  Then we walk up some stairs, over the tracks, and up more stairs to the red line and go from Teatralna Universitet (red) seven stops to Svyatoshn (red).  Then we walk to a bus stop and wait anywhere from one to forty minutes to catch the bus to Vorzel, then it's a three to four block walk to the orphanage.

To make matters worse, those words are the phonetic spellings for the Ukrainian names.  Each stop also has a Russian name.  The Ukrainian names are usually listed first and are actually in Cyrillic letters.  Since so much is indecipherable, we started to associate English words with the Cyrillic Ukrainian spellings.   So, for example, "Svyatoshn" in Cyrillic looks like "CBRTOWNH" which, you must agree, is really "Cybertown" to an English speaker.  This habit is not always helpful, since it makes three names for each stop (Ukrainian, Russian and the English nick-name).   Since we hadn't talked this out yet, I didn't always connect Bill's directions about "Svyatoshn" with my memories of "Cybertown?" ...I was further LOST because the "Z" sound is the letter "3" in cyrillic.  So, Zoloti is similar to "3O--OTI" and Vorzel is similar to "BOP3--."  The dashes are for cyrillic letters that I can't make on the computer, but in the end, the words look like "3BOP---" and BOP3---."  It probably would have been fine, if I could only remember which comes when.  ...Not being necessarily detail oriented, it was a rough morning for me.

Our metro stop.  This is what you see after descending the two sets of escalators.

This is where we wait for the train. 

This is one of the frescoes inside the archway.  They are all unique.

This is looking down at the metro tracks.  There's no barrier, and it always terrifies me to have the kids near the edge.

Reilly took a photo of the train as it pulled in.

Anyway, I finally figured it out and we made it.  Ruslan continues to be adorable.  He looked around a little for Bill, but seemed OK with the "B" team after a while.  We brought a coloring book and crayons (no interest), and a balloon (huge thrill).  He LOVED the balloon.  He usually combat crawls everywhere, but he can get up on all fours when the need arises.  To throw the balloon, he gets on all fours, lift his torso upright, throws the balloon in the air with both hands and then, since he doesn't have enough torso strength to hold himself up more than a millisecond, he falls quickly down and bangs the floor hard.  He usually manages to catch himself with both hands before his chin hits.  It's a pretty loud thump and it's painful to watch, but he laughed and squealed the whole time throwing and chasing that balloon.  Nevertheless, I finally took it away, hoping to delay the stress fracture that I know is in our future.

Then he let me hold him up and we went for a "walk" around the orphanage.  He was enamored with the kitchen.  It seemed as though he had never been in it before.  We looked on every shelf, opened every door and drawer (all empty), turned on and off the water and chatted it up with the cook.  It is primitive, and looks about to fall over, but very, very clean.  A woman brought in a pot of chicken/rice/veggie soup and it looks like they cook it in another Baby House and then distribute the food to the other houses. The Baby House Five kitchen is mostly for dishwashing.

We left just before noon and got back to our apartment about 3:45.  Even though it was Saturday, the bus and subway were packed.  I was TOTALLY WIPED OUT, and slept until dinner.  I'm continually surprised over how tired I am here, anytime we go out.  Bill went running before dinner and said there there was some sort of October Fest going on downtown, which probably accounts for the crowds.

He also went grocery shopping with the older kids while I did school with Sharon in the evening.  At first, we bought all our drinking water.  But it was getting expensive and heavy to carry water for six people every time we went shopping.  So, I started to boil tap water a few days after we arrived.  This was working OK, as far as it goes, until Friday, when I noticed the tap water had taken on a distinct yellow tint.  God forgive me, but that yellow tint combined with the decidedly not clean taste was more than I could handle. I also noticed that none of us were peeing, since none of us were drinking.  I finally broke down and asked Bill to buy a water filter.  How wonderful to have clean, good water anytime I want!!

I was here in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin wall, but after "Glasnost."  A LOT has changed.  One thing I remember distinctly is that I went for two whole months without even one drink of clear, cold water. All the tap water was yellow-brown and gritty.  All they had to drink was warm seltzer (bubble) water, or warm orange Fanta.  I lasted two months in 1988 without even one drink of cold water and I remember being happy.  How did it happen?  I didn't even make it a week this time!   Although, in 1988 when I got back to the states, we went to Pizza Hut right away and I remember getting a quart size ice water, all to myself.  I'm sure it was jet lag and travel stress, but I sat in the booth and cried over that huge plastic glass. I was so grateful for that ice water.  ...I didn't cry this time, but I'm so glad we bought that filter!!