stevenpiziks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stevenpiziks) wrote2010-07-07 04:54 pm
stevenpiziks) wrote2010-07-07 04:54 pm
Entry tags:
Ukraine: SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2010
Sasha got his wish, but in a weird way. Mom got sick.
When I went to her room this morning to see about breakfast, she answered the door in her nightgown and said she was ill. Her stomach hurt quite a lot, had been all night long. At least she didn’t have a fever. She definitely didn’t want to go to Ostapy today.
I made her comfortable as best I could--hotel rooms aren’t conducive to that, unfortunately--and Gene and I went down to breakfast. Gene said he’d had some problems yesterday evening, too. Ah ha! I think it was the pizza. Mom and I ordered one kind, Gene another, but Gene and I traded slices of ours, so we all three ate from the same kind. It wouldn’t be unheard of for one person to miss the contamination while the other two caught it.
Ironic, yeah? We worry about contaminated food and water in Ostapy and come across it in the city.
Over breakfast in the hotel (more bread and sausage slices), Gene and I talked about what to do. The original plan was to travel to Kyiv tomorrow, Sunday, but if Mom wasn’t better, or had only partly recovered, a three-hour ride in a stuffy van over bumpy roads would only make her worse. On the other hand, if we changed our plans and then she made a quick recovery, we’d be stuck in Korosten with nothing to do.
We bought Mom some bottled water and checked on her. She wasn’t feeling any better, had gotten even a little worse. Her sheets really needed changing, and her bathroom needed to be cleaned. I took Mom into my room, then towed Gene away to search for the maid. He found her and I told him to explain my mother was very sick and needed help. The maid tut-tutted and came right down to take care of it. She cleaned everything up, stripped and remade the bed, and brought down an electric kettle and tea things. Then we reinstalled Mom in her room.
And then we hung around the hotel doing nothing much. I read and watched videos on my laptop. By afternoon, Mom was still unimproved.
My mother doesn’t like to complain or ask anyone to do anything for her, especially rearrange travel plans. The pattern held true here. I asked her what she thought about going to Kyiv tomorrow.
“I’d been thinking about that,” she said. “I suppose I could lay down in the back of the van with a basin in case I needed to throw up and I’d be okay, I don’t know. We’ll do whatever you decide.”
Right.
Gene and I went out to find lunch. I thought about joking that by now people must think we were dating, but didn’t--I don’t know him that well. The hotel recommended a place down the street and to the right some distance. It turned out to be right across the street from the local Orthodox church, a big white building topped with gold minarets. The front was covered with scaffolds, and the outbuildings were being redone. The whole area was a big mess, actually, and I saw only two construction workers.
The restaurant across the street didn’t really look like a restaurant. It was a nondescript brown building with a small sign above the door that I assume gave the restaurant’s name. This seems to happen a lot in Ukraine--businesses inhabit places that don’t look the slightest bit like what they are, and only a small sign tells you what’s inside. Very few out here have display windows that show you want they have. Every single restaurant has been hidden away, as if it were scared of having customers, and every one was deserted, or nearly so, either because no one has the money to eat there, or because no one can find the places, or both.
This particular place was in the basement of the building. We headed downstairs into a little warren of rooms--a private room with long table and two benches, a little bar with tables to one side, a separate eating area. The whole thing was done in American Hunting Lodge, with wood walls sometimes artfully stripped away to reveal brick beneath, an animal pelts hanging everywhere. The waitress put us in the little dining room, and we were the only customers. And the little dance began.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but in Korosten, the restaurants have menus that list everything the restaurant can possibly make, but on any given day they only have certain things available, so you can order something, only to have the waitress tell you they don’t have it today. So you end up asking what’s available instead of reading the menu. Also, I can’t read the menus, so Gene would have to translate, but it’s nearly impossible to translate a menu--he can give the name of a food, but I won’t know what it is, so he’d have to go on to explain it, and I still won’t know if it’s any good, so he’d go on to something else, by which time I’ve forgotten what the first thing was. A couple places have had menus in English, but the translation is poor, and puzzling out what they mean is a graduation exercise in linguistics.
In the end, we usually ask the waitress what’s good and order that.
Also, Ukrainian restaurants order BIG meals. Soup, meal, salad, dessert. And soup isn’t a cup--it’s a full bowl. With bread on the side. The salads are heavy, usually cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes (all very, very fresh, probably from a garden behind the restaurant). The meal involves meat and potatoes, often fried in oil. I can’t eat it all, I just can’t. And they say American restaurants serve huge portions.
The soup choices were borscht or another one with a name I can’t remember. Melenka or melyenka, I think. I ordered that because I hadn’t had it before. It had bacon, many vegetables, and a lot of oil in it. The bowl was huge, and the soup was very, very heavy. Then came a marinated pork chop with fried potatoes on the side and the aforementioned tomato-cucumber salad with sunflower oil poured over it. Gene puts heart-stopping amounts of salt and pepper on everything and eats every bite. I eat about half and I’m done. I wish I could take the rest, but there’s no fridge in our room, so I can’t.
Gene says the hotel is charging far too much for what we’re getting. We should have a mini-fridge and daily cleaning for what we’re being charged, he says. (The maid only comes in when you ask for it, and we have no fridge.) So I think I’m going to be rather more demanding of the hotel now.
Over our meal, I decided that even if Mom started feeling better today, she probably wouldn’t feel up to a three-hour drive in a stuffy van tomorrow, so we’d put off Kyiv to another day. Gene called Larissa’s cell phone to make sure it would be all right for Sasha to stay another day in Ostapy. We were sure there wouldn’t be a problem, but we needed to check. Gene talked to Galina, who was perfectly happy to let Sasha stay. Then Sasha came on the line and Gene gave me the phone.
I asked how Sasha was doing. “Good,” he said. “I wish I could stay another day in Ostapy.” This was his way of asking for more time without asking.
I told him about his grandmother’s illness and that we’d be staying another day, so he could have more time in Ostapy after all. He was very happy about that.
“I want to help them,” he said. “Everyone here works so hard. My sisters work hard, Galina works hard.”
“We’ll come get you tomorrow afternoon.”
I also asked Gene what Sasha had talked about when he and his parents were walking together and when Sasha and his sisters were walking together. Gene said it was mostly reminiscing about what Sasha had done in this place or that. One house was the site of an old man’s death, and Sasha had been sure the man’s ghost was caught in a tree in the yard, for example. He also said that when I was showing the videos of Maksim, the two sisters were laughing a little and saying, half-joking, “He looks nothing like Viktor. Who’s son is that?”
I had actually noticed it, too. Mackie looks nothing like Viktor. The men in Ukraine tend to have wide, bulbous noses or long, thin, hawk-like ones. Viktor has the former. He also has bright blue eyes, very dark hair that’s going gray, and a thin build that was probably whipcord when he was younger. Mackie has a button nose, brown eyes and hair, and a wide, stocky build. However, none of this means Viktor isn’t Mackie’s father; genetics play interesting tricks sometimes. Sasha and Maksim both have the same brown eyes, and I thought they therefore had their mother’s eyes, but Marija’s eyes are green. Sasha does have his mother’s hair--thick and black.
Gene said he asked Marija where she was from, since her hair and skin color didn’t match any other Ostapyan’s. Marija said she came from the Crimea, which has a large population of people descended from Tartar invaders. Tartars have swarthy skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. I’d long suspected this--I’ve told Sasha that I suspected he may have Mongol in his ancestry; if you gave him epicanthic folds, he’d fit right into an Asian population. Looks like I wasn’t that far off.
When we got back, I went upstairs to check on Mom. Still sick, very much so. I told her about the change in plans, and she seemed glad about it. Gene and I went to the store to get a few things for her, and then afterward I hung around in my room just reading and resting until supper.
Mom was uninterested in supper, though she said she’d like a boiled potato and some crackers, if we could find such. So Gene and I went out. The hotel restaurant had been taken over by a wedding, so we went elsewhere. We didn’t want to brave the hunting restaurant again--Gene said it was too expensive for what you got--so we went to another place just off this town’s Lenin Square, which is just what it sounds like: a square dominated by a red granite statue of Lenin. The restaurant was done in blue, nearly hidden by a willow tree, and utterly deserted, just like all the others. I told Gene that in America, you sometimes--or even often times--have to wait for a table at a restaurant, especially in big cities, and that surprised him.
The recommended supper dish turned out to be a sort of flat omelet with steak and mushrooms in it, with fried potatoes on the side. And tomato cucumber salad. Again, I could only eat about half of mine while Gene ate everything. Whoof! The restaurant also prepared some boiled potatoes to go for Mom. We stopped at a store for crackers, too, and brought them back.
Mom was feeling much improved by now and was able to eat. I found the maid and tipped her 140 grivna (about $18). She didn’t want to take so much money, but I pressed it on her, and she finally accepted. Probably made her week.
I talked to Sasha again as well. He was in good spirits. He said he was playing with his nephews and hanging out with his sisters and that he’d clocked himself on a low lintel in the stable. I wonder if he has a secret hope that I’ll let him stay for the summer, or even forever, but I won’t. Not only would Kala and I miss him too much, but Maksim would be deeply hurt if Sasha didn’t come back, and Aran would, too. And, on the purely practical side, his opportunities in Ostapy are nearly nonexistent. He can be a subsistence farmer or, apparently, go to work in the mines. That’s about it.
If Sasha wants to come back to Ostapy when he’s an adult, that’ll be up to him, but right now he needs to be in a place where he can take advantage of what he has.
I talked to Mom about how the people of Ostapy must see Sasha. Here was the son of the village ne’er do well, who rarely went to school, who stole food and slept in haystacks. Finally someone (I’m guessing Valentina, the head of the village) called social services and he was removed. The Ostapyans were probably thinking he would go to the Internat for five years, where he’d be fed and clothed and educated until he was sixteen, and then he’d return to Ostapy. That’s exactly what happened to one girl, in fact. (And Maksim? Who knows.) But then Sasha vanished. They had no news of him. The Internat didn’t tell Marija or anyone else what happened to him. He was just gone.
Now, six years later, he returns to Ostapy, taller than any full-grown man in the village, wearing expensive clothes and shoes. He arrives in a hired car that took him from an airplane that carried him thousands of miles. He speaks an exotic language and has visited places they’ve only occasionally seen on television. He’s changed quite a lot, but he’s still recognizable as their Sasha. And they’re happy for him.
Later in the evening, I was bored and strolled down to the park with the statue of the warrior on the hill, without Gene. I took a couple back streets to get there, actually, and discovered that Korostony houses have fenced-in courtyards. The fences are made of a number of materials--wrought iron, wooden slats, chain link filled in with plastic. The houses themselves all have the corrugated tin roofs and have that kicked-around, shabby look. No sidewalks back there, so you have to walk in the street. You catch the occasional whiff of open sewer, too, and stray dogs and cats are everywhere.
The park was beautiful. A river runs through it, tumbling over enormous boulders. The hillside on the other side of the river is really more of a cliff, and paths and walkways and staircases have been installed for strolling. You can either take a staircase straight to the top, or take the walkways and meander up there gradually and take in the view. It was Saturday night, and people were everywhere, walking, chatting, even picnicking. Some were couples, some were groups of friends, some were families with children. I found a section with a couple-three restaurants and cafés, and a club just outside the boundaries of the park boomed loud music. Apparently Korosten has a decent night life.
I elected to climb straight up to the top of the hill. The big brown warrior with his gilded helmet and sword stood bravely at the top, and an inscribed shield at his feet described him in Cyrillic, but I couldn’t read it and have no idea who he was or what he did. I looked out across Korosten, stretched out below me past the trees. A marble railing was all the separated me from a steep, steep hillside covered with scree, and the marble was still warm from the day’s sun, though it was nearly dark now.
There was also a reconstruction of a an ancient fort up there, complete with towers and battlements, and I guessed this was the site of the original Korosten. The recreation was clearly meant for children--a battering ram was made up as a swing, for example. The big gates were locked, but I followed the fort wall to the end and found you could get around it by hopping a short split-rail fence. Even as I watched, a young man hopped it and walked down a well-worn path.
On the other side of the fake battle wall was a bunch of imposing, dull Soviet-style buildings. They looked to be abandoned. The guy walked among the buildings and disappeared. I kept watching. A few minutes later, he came back. Two young women also hopped the fence. They wore short skirts and high heels. They disappeared among the buildings, then came back. My guess is the local drug trade was set up back there.
I decided not to investigate the seamy underside of Korosten and instead took the long way down the hill. It was a very pleasant walk, and there were lots and lots of people enjoying it like I was. I wondered if I were the only American there.
I realized I didn’t have anything to drink in my room, so I hunted around until I found a tiny store that was still open. They were doing a thriving business--lots and lots of people crowded the place, and they were all buying alcohol, mostly wine. I bought two containers of juice and came back to the hotel, where I drank almost all of one in one shot.
Then it was time for bed.
When I went to her room this morning to see about breakfast, she answered the door in her nightgown and said she was ill. Her stomach hurt quite a lot, had been all night long. At least she didn’t have a fever. She definitely didn’t want to go to Ostapy today.
I made her comfortable as best I could--hotel rooms aren’t conducive to that, unfortunately--and Gene and I went down to breakfast. Gene said he’d had some problems yesterday evening, too. Ah ha! I think it was the pizza. Mom and I ordered one kind, Gene another, but Gene and I traded slices of ours, so we all three ate from the same kind. It wouldn’t be unheard of for one person to miss the contamination while the other two caught it.
Ironic, yeah? We worry about contaminated food and water in Ostapy and come across it in the city.
Over breakfast in the hotel (more bread and sausage slices), Gene and I talked about what to do. The original plan was to travel to Kyiv tomorrow, Sunday, but if Mom wasn’t better, or had only partly recovered, a three-hour ride in a stuffy van over bumpy roads would only make her worse. On the other hand, if we changed our plans and then she made a quick recovery, we’d be stuck in Korosten with nothing to do.
We bought Mom some bottled water and checked on her. She wasn’t feeling any better, had gotten even a little worse. Her sheets really needed changing, and her bathroom needed to be cleaned. I took Mom into my room, then towed Gene away to search for the maid. He found her and I told him to explain my mother was very sick and needed help. The maid tut-tutted and came right down to take care of it. She cleaned everything up, stripped and remade the bed, and brought down an electric kettle and tea things. Then we reinstalled Mom in her room.
And then we hung around the hotel doing nothing much. I read and watched videos on my laptop. By afternoon, Mom was still unimproved.
My mother doesn’t like to complain or ask anyone to do anything for her, especially rearrange travel plans. The pattern held true here. I asked her what she thought about going to Kyiv tomorrow.
“I’d been thinking about that,” she said. “I suppose I could lay down in the back of the van with a basin in case I needed to throw up and I’d be okay, I don’t know. We’ll do whatever you decide.”
Right.
Gene and I went out to find lunch. I thought about joking that by now people must think we were dating, but didn’t--I don’t know him that well. The hotel recommended a place down the street and to the right some distance. It turned out to be right across the street from the local Orthodox church, a big white building topped with gold minarets. The front was covered with scaffolds, and the outbuildings were being redone. The whole area was a big mess, actually, and I saw only two construction workers.
The restaurant across the street didn’t really look like a restaurant. It was a nondescript brown building with a small sign above the door that I assume gave the restaurant’s name. This seems to happen a lot in Ukraine--businesses inhabit places that don’t look the slightest bit like what they are, and only a small sign tells you what’s inside. Very few out here have display windows that show you want they have. Every single restaurant has been hidden away, as if it were scared of having customers, and every one was deserted, or nearly so, either because no one has the money to eat there, or because no one can find the places, or both.
This particular place was in the basement of the building. We headed downstairs into a little warren of rooms--a private room with long table and two benches, a little bar with tables to one side, a separate eating area. The whole thing was done in American Hunting Lodge, with wood walls sometimes artfully stripped away to reveal brick beneath, an animal pelts hanging everywhere. The waitress put us in the little dining room, and we were the only customers. And the little dance began.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but in Korosten, the restaurants have menus that list everything the restaurant can possibly make, but on any given day they only have certain things available, so you can order something, only to have the waitress tell you they don’t have it today. So you end up asking what’s available instead of reading the menu. Also, I can’t read the menus, so Gene would have to translate, but it’s nearly impossible to translate a menu--he can give the name of a food, but I won’t know what it is, so he’d have to go on to explain it, and I still won’t know if it’s any good, so he’d go on to something else, by which time I’ve forgotten what the first thing was. A couple places have had menus in English, but the translation is poor, and puzzling out what they mean is a graduation exercise in linguistics.
In the end, we usually ask the waitress what’s good and order that.
Also, Ukrainian restaurants order BIG meals. Soup, meal, salad, dessert. And soup isn’t a cup--it’s a full bowl. With bread on the side. The salads are heavy, usually cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes (all very, very fresh, probably from a garden behind the restaurant). The meal involves meat and potatoes, often fried in oil. I can’t eat it all, I just can’t. And they say American restaurants serve huge portions.
The soup choices were borscht or another one with a name I can’t remember. Melenka or melyenka, I think. I ordered that because I hadn’t had it before. It had bacon, many vegetables, and a lot of oil in it. The bowl was huge, and the soup was very, very heavy. Then came a marinated pork chop with fried potatoes on the side and the aforementioned tomato-cucumber salad with sunflower oil poured over it. Gene puts heart-stopping amounts of salt and pepper on everything and eats every bite. I eat about half and I’m done. I wish I could take the rest, but there’s no fridge in our room, so I can’t.
Gene says the hotel is charging far too much for what we’re getting. We should have a mini-fridge and daily cleaning for what we’re being charged, he says. (The maid only comes in when you ask for it, and we have no fridge.) So I think I’m going to be rather more demanding of the hotel now.
Over our meal, I decided that even if Mom started feeling better today, she probably wouldn’t feel up to a three-hour drive in a stuffy van tomorrow, so we’d put off Kyiv to another day. Gene called Larissa’s cell phone to make sure it would be all right for Sasha to stay another day in Ostapy. We were sure there wouldn’t be a problem, but we needed to check. Gene talked to Galina, who was perfectly happy to let Sasha stay. Then Sasha came on the line and Gene gave me the phone.
I asked how Sasha was doing. “Good,” he said. “I wish I could stay another day in Ostapy.” This was his way of asking for more time without asking.
I told him about his grandmother’s illness and that we’d be staying another day, so he could have more time in Ostapy after all. He was very happy about that.
“I want to help them,” he said. “Everyone here works so hard. My sisters work hard, Galina works hard.”
“We’ll come get you tomorrow afternoon.”
I also asked Gene what Sasha had talked about when he and his parents were walking together and when Sasha and his sisters were walking together. Gene said it was mostly reminiscing about what Sasha had done in this place or that. One house was the site of an old man’s death, and Sasha had been sure the man’s ghost was caught in a tree in the yard, for example. He also said that when I was showing the videos of Maksim, the two sisters were laughing a little and saying, half-joking, “He looks nothing like Viktor. Who’s son is that?”
I had actually noticed it, too. Mackie looks nothing like Viktor. The men in Ukraine tend to have wide, bulbous noses or long, thin, hawk-like ones. Viktor has the former. He also has bright blue eyes, very dark hair that’s going gray, and a thin build that was probably whipcord when he was younger. Mackie has a button nose, brown eyes and hair, and a wide, stocky build. However, none of this means Viktor isn’t Mackie’s father; genetics play interesting tricks sometimes. Sasha and Maksim both have the same brown eyes, and I thought they therefore had their mother’s eyes, but Marija’s eyes are green. Sasha does have his mother’s hair--thick and black.
Gene said he asked Marija where she was from, since her hair and skin color didn’t match any other Ostapyan’s. Marija said she came from the Crimea, which has a large population of people descended from Tartar invaders. Tartars have swarthy skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. I’d long suspected this--I’ve told Sasha that I suspected he may have Mongol in his ancestry; if you gave him epicanthic folds, he’d fit right into an Asian population. Looks like I wasn’t that far off.
When we got back, I went upstairs to check on Mom. Still sick, very much so. I told her about the change in plans, and she seemed glad about it. Gene and I went to the store to get a few things for her, and then afterward I hung around in my room just reading and resting until supper.
Mom was uninterested in supper, though she said she’d like a boiled potato and some crackers, if we could find such. So Gene and I went out. The hotel restaurant had been taken over by a wedding, so we went elsewhere. We didn’t want to brave the hunting restaurant again--Gene said it was too expensive for what you got--so we went to another place just off this town’s Lenin Square, which is just what it sounds like: a square dominated by a red granite statue of Lenin. The restaurant was done in blue, nearly hidden by a willow tree, and utterly deserted, just like all the others. I told Gene that in America, you sometimes--or even often times--have to wait for a table at a restaurant, especially in big cities, and that surprised him.
The recommended supper dish turned out to be a sort of flat omelet with steak and mushrooms in it, with fried potatoes on the side. And tomato cucumber salad. Again, I could only eat about half of mine while Gene ate everything. Whoof! The restaurant also prepared some boiled potatoes to go for Mom. We stopped at a store for crackers, too, and brought them back.
Mom was feeling much improved by now and was able to eat. I found the maid and tipped her 140 grivna (about $18). She didn’t want to take so much money, but I pressed it on her, and she finally accepted. Probably made her week.
I talked to Sasha again as well. He was in good spirits. He said he was playing with his nephews and hanging out with his sisters and that he’d clocked himself on a low lintel in the stable. I wonder if he has a secret hope that I’ll let him stay for the summer, or even forever, but I won’t. Not only would Kala and I miss him too much, but Maksim would be deeply hurt if Sasha didn’t come back, and Aran would, too. And, on the purely practical side, his opportunities in Ostapy are nearly nonexistent. He can be a subsistence farmer or, apparently, go to work in the mines. That’s about it.
If Sasha wants to come back to Ostapy when he’s an adult, that’ll be up to him, but right now he needs to be in a place where he can take advantage of what he has.
I talked to Mom about how the people of Ostapy must see Sasha. Here was the son of the village ne’er do well, who rarely went to school, who stole food and slept in haystacks. Finally someone (I’m guessing Valentina, the head of the village) called social services and he was removed. The Ostapyans were probably thinking he would go to the Internat for five years, where he’d be fed and clothed and educated until he was sixteen, and then he’d return to Ostapy. That’s exactly what happened to one girl, in fact. (And Maksim? Who knows.) But then Sasha vanished. They had no news of him. The Internat didn’t tell Marija or anyone else what happened to him. He was just gone.
Now, six years later, he returns to Ostapy, taller than any full-grown man in the village, wearing expensive clothes and shoes. He arrives in a hired car that took him from an airplane that carried him thousands of miles. He speaks an exotic language and has visited places they’ve only occasionally seen on television. He’s changed quite a lot, but he’s still recognizable as their Sasha. And they’re happy for him.
Later in the evening, I was bored and strolled down to the park with the statue of the warrior on the hill, without Gene. I took a couple back streets to get there, actually, and discovered that Korostony houses have fenced-in courtyards. The fences are made of a number of materials--wrought iron, wooden slats, chain link filled in with plastic. The houses themselves all have the corrugated tin roofs and have that kicked-around, shabby look. No sidewalks back there, so you have to walk in the street. You catch the occasional whiff of open sewer, too, and stray dogs and cats are everywhere.
The park was beautiful. A river runs through it, tumbling over enormous boulders. The hillside on the other side of the river is really more of a cliff, and paths and walkways and staircases have been installed for strolling. You can either take a staircase straight to the top, or take the walkways and meander up there gradually and take in the view. It was Saturday night, and people were everywhere, walking, chatting, even picnicking. Some were couples, some were groups of friends, some were families with children. I found a section with a couple-three restaurants and cafés, and a club just outside the boundaries of the park boomed loud music. Apparently Korosten has a decent night life.
I elected to climb straight up to the top of the hill. The big brown warrior with his gilded helmet and sword stood bravely at the top, and an inscribed shield at his feet described him in Cyrillic, but I couldn’t read it and have no idea who he was or what he did. I looked out across Korosten, stretched out below me past the trees. A marble railing was all the separated me from a steep, steep hillside covered with scree, and the marble was still warm from the day’s sun, though it was nearly dark now.
There was also a reconstruction of a an ancient fort up there, complete with towers and battlements, and I guessed this was the site of the original Korosten. The recreation was clearly meant for children--a battering ram was made up as a swing, for example. The big gates were locked, but I followed the fort wall to the end and found you could get around it by hopping a short split-rail fence. Even as I watched, a young man hopped it and walked down a well-worn path.
On the other side of the fake battle wall was a bunch of imposing, dull Soviet-style buildings. They looked to be abandoned. The guy walked among the buildings and disappeared. I kept watching. A few minutes later, he came back. Two young women also hopped the fence. They wore short skirts and high heels. They disappeared among the buildings, then came back. My guess is the local drug trade was set up back there.
I decided not to investigate the seamy underside of Korosten and instead took the long way down the hill. It was a very pleasant walk, and there were lots and lots of people enjoying it like I was. I wondered if I were the only American there.
I realized I didn’t have anything to drink in my room, so I hunted around until I found a tiny store that was still open. They were doing a thriving business--lots and lots of people crowded the place, and they were all buying alcohol, mostly wine. I bought two containers of juice and came back to the hotel, where I drank almost all of one in one shot.
Then it was time for bed.