A Cold, A Lounge Singer and a Bit of Pork Fat

Day 4 of my cold and it’s still a misery. I’m hoping that by this afternoon and drinking some more of that fakey-lemon medicine you put in hot water I’ll be good enough to go visit Mena. I’ve missed her like crazy, and all the pictures Ois takes and the phone call she made yesterday to me isn’t as good as a real visit. It was adorable yesterday afternoon- when Natasha was talking on her cell phone, Mena kept asking, “Mama? Mama?” so Natasha got the idea to call me sick in bed so Mena and I could talk to each other. It was kind of like a parallel conversation between two senior citizens though, as neither of us knew what the other one was saying, so we were just babbling away one-sided, taking turns.

I’ve got no new kid stuff to report, so I’ll tell you about where we are staying instead. I think we are in the “fancy” hotel in the town, which is $25 CNDN a night. It’s nice enough, though very basic. It’s spotlessly clean and the lady downstairs that runs the place loves us, so that’s good. The restaurant is absolutely excellent. Seriously, the food in Mukachevo is miles ahead of Kiev; everything is local and when you order a salad stuff is literally just pulled out of the ground for it, so you can imagine how fresh and delicious it all is. We’ve both eaten so many latkes by now, I can’t even tell you. I’m surprised we don’t need to make more holes in our belts. Ukrainians are just about as BBQ-crazy as Canadians. Last night we ate in the little restaurant and we had shishkabobs grilled over a wood fire that were so delicious, we’ll be thinking about them forever. I’d been wanting to try Salo, which is the beloved national dish here, but nobody else has wanted to try it with me so far- however Natasha loves it, so we ordered some last night finally! It’s basically very thin slices of pure pork fat served with raw garlic cloves. You eat it on black bread with a bit of salt & pepper, slicing the garlic clove up so you get a bite of it with each bite of the bread and salo. Everybody has their way of doing it, and they have a salo festival where people bring all different kinds, like a beer festival. Some brine it with spices, some bake it in the oven, there is a million ways to do it, but it all amounts to thin slices of fat on bread in the end. It also depends of course on what you feed the pig while it’s alive- beets apparently add sweetness, etc etc. In any case, it arrived, white, quivery, translucent almost. The bread was fabulous- tangy and grainy with the genius addition of coriander seeds sprinkled on the crust which added almost a floral touch to the flavour. It wasn’t unlike putting butter on bread, in the sense of the richness of fat spread onto something baked; far less weird than it sounds. It tasted and had a mouthfeel like butter too, creamy, cool, rich, and it had a soft flavour of it’s own- it wasn’t tasteless. With the bracing bite of garlic added in, it was really good in fact. Natasha said it wasn’t the best version she’s ever tried, so when we go back to Kiev she wants to bring me some from the place she buys it for herself- she says it’s the best in her opinion in the entire country and she could live on it.

Everybody in the world here seems to know I’m sick, and I have complete strangers asking about the state of my health as if I have the bubonic plague, and not a simple cold. Everybody has advice for me: drink this, eat that. Stay away from Russian medicines, they’re not as good as Ukrainian brands. Go to my pharmacist- not the one he told you, his pharmacist is an idiot and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Put this goo inside your nose, put this cream on your chest, drink this herbal tea at 2 o’clock if it’s raining and you dreamed of pink llamas the night before. All of a sudden I have 50 honourary Babas all fussing and wanting to take care of me, it would nearly be easier just to roll over and die so you could get a little peace and quiet!

I’ll tell you what I’d like to do though- I’d really like to have a hot bath. We have a peculiar little bathroom here, it’s very, er- compact. When you sit on the john, your chin is precisely level with the sink that clearly was intended for the 7 dwarfs. It’s about the size of a dinner plate, and the piping goes straight down so you can see all the treasure people have lost down there- most notable is a toothbrush, perfectly vertical. It’s kind of like those novelty beer glasses that have an eyeball in the bottom, so when you finish your drink there it is staring back at you. Each time I lean over to brush my teeth it’s there looking back at me. The shower is also a source of amusement. I was on the can the other day thinking about what the difference is that makes us accept something or get annoyed with it- where that line in the sand stands and why. I was looking at the two random pipes that protrude up out of the shower floor like a duo of turtle heads, and I was thinking about that if any builders would have did that in my bathroom, I would have freaked out. Yet if you saw the same thing in an outdoor shower at a public beach, you probably wouldn’t care less. Why is that? It’s equally as bad, right? Anyhow, that’s like a lot of stuff here- odd little things that seem to be perfectly acceptable, but leave you scratching your head. The showerhead is the same story. Remember that Seinfeld episode where Elaine & Kramer have flat hair because of the low-flow showerhead? That’s me. We have precisely about 3 minutes of lukewarm water that progressively gets colder and colder until you can’t stand it and you have to jump out. I’m pretty sure I have about a week’s worth of conditioner build-up in my hair by now; the water pressure is like a dehydrated 80 year old man with a prostate blockage piddling on your head. None of this is worth even mentioning to the lady that runs the hotel though- I mean, what’s the point? It’s not like she can magically do anything. So there is no point in whining about it. We’re just happy to have some hot water in the first place.

The funniest thing by a mile though is the nightly “entertainment” in the fancy hotel restaurant. They have 2 here: the restaurant with all the taxidermy animals and the indoor fish pond where the poor goldfish swim through a bunch of dirty coins and the pair of budgies that probably have lung cancer from second-hand smoke (this is the “casual” restaurant) and then the other one with the insane curtains layered over the windows like it’s Buckingham Palace and each place setting has 3 or 4 wine glasses that are all instantly removed as soon as you sit down as if they all have little holes in the bottom and are only for show. The elaborate centerpieces from the dollar store are tall enough that you have to crane your head around to see your fellow diners at the same table- it’s like a Ukrainian Liberace manages the place from beyond the grave! At night, they make the waiters get up behind a 1980’s Casio electric keyboard and sing Scorpions cover songs for your dining pleasure- OMG it’s a hoot! On Friday though I think they got their special singer in to kick off the weekend. He was about 6’4” in a white jacket, burgundy shirt and black pants; stocky as if he pushes an ox-cart by day, and he looked like he had a raccoon on his head. He was just given’ er as he belted out a broken English version of Lady In Red as he sang higher and higher until the sound cut out into feedback. It was magic! Like a cabaret act from Phoenix Nights! All we were missing at that point was Johnny Vegas drinking beer from a flower vase in his wheelchair! Natasha, Oisin and I were nearly crying with laughter. We should have been paying *him*.

Anyhow, it’s time to brave the will-I-or-won’t-I have-hot-water shower, and then we’ll wander into the town center for a cup of coffee before we leave to go visit Mena. Oh, and more good news: her bloodwork came back from Kiev, and she is negative for any scary stuff like HepC and HIV, etc. We weren’t really worried about it, but it’s still good to have that confirmation. We didn’t get a court date yesterday, so hopefully it will come today. Then our plan is to move just outside the city limits to a house-share in a rural area. We went to see it the other day and it was really nice. The main attraction is that it has a washing machine. If we don’t get there soon, we’ll have to start turning the underwear inside-out, LOL. Actually, Vladimir our driver is such a sweetheart, he told us to bag up our clothes last night and he drove down from his house with his wife to pick them up- she is insisting she wash them for us to help us out and refuses to take a penny- which we will not hear of. The lady at the hotel here told Natasha that she would do them, but she would charge $2.00 USD per item! Natasha started laughing at that and told her she was out of her mind. Vladimir feels so bad for us, that he is also “forgetting” to charge us for some taxi rides and for times he has to wait for us- like when Natasha needs to run in someplace to get a signature on a document and it takes 30 minutes. I just can’t tell you how nice people are, and how much they go out of their way to help. It feels like I’m in Winnipeg again. For all the ups & downs we’ve had while we’ve been here, none of it has ever had anything to do with people-things. It’s all been bureaucracy type stuff. Out of all the places I have ever travelled in my life, I have to say Ukraine has been the warmest, nicest, and kindest in terms of people.