Day 4—May 16—Monday: Consulate, Train tickets, Turkish coffee

Much of the morning was spent trying to find the American Consulate. I thought we should register with the consulate to let them know where we are. After a lot of walking and backtracking, which included finding the embassy rather than the consulate, we arrived at the gate of the consulate. A rather tightly packed crowd of 100 or so Ukrainians milled about in the area outside the gate, waiting their turn to be called inside. By showing our passports, we were allowed to pass through the crowd and into the grounds of the consulate. We got the registration papers, but the consular assistant told me it would be better to register online. That way, our information would be available worldwide on the State Department network, rather than just locally at the Kyiv consulate. That sounded OK to me, since the forms were more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and we had lost so much time already getting to the consulate. I was ready to move on to the other things I wanted to do, and I would just register online later.

As I was to discover, Internet connections were not easy to find, and the few times I did get online, the connections were exasperatingly slow. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of our time in Kyiv trapped at a computer trying to fill out forms online. We ended up not registering at all. Duuuh…I work as a consular agent for the U.S., and I didn’t think of registering online before we left! The only semblance of justification I can offer is that the online registration of U.S. citizens traveling overseas is a relatively recent development, and we don’t travel overseas. We live overseas.

We went to the train station to buy our tickets to L’viv for Wednesday night. (Left: Abbie and Petro crossing one of Kiev's tree-lined streets on the way to the train station.) While there, I saw an Internet café and checked my e-mail (which is when I knew I would not be registering online). It took 20 minutes just to read a couple of short e-mails. Abbie and I were hungry, so we bought four small sandwiches and a bottle of water for €0.55 (about $0.70). Some things are really cheap here. Also got coffee here, but we didn’t realize it was Turkish coffee until we went to stir it. Then we had to wait for the grounds to settle before drinking the contents of the upper half of the cup. Someone told me the other day about an ethnic group that had the habit of making a mud tea out of the soil where they take up new residence, and making their children drink it. This is to get their children accustomed to the new location and its bacteria, I suppose. Perhaps mud pies children make (and eat) are not so bad, after all. The coffee reminded me of the story of the mud tea.

Cultural note:I mentioned the restroom facilities at McDonald's as being an important reference point. You have to pay for using nearly all public restrooms in Ukraine (usual price= 0,50 UAH, or about 10 US cents), and I've included a picture here to illustrate another cultural difference. It was more usual to find the floor built up level with the stool.

In the evening, Dima and Natasha took us to the Karavan Mall, where he works in a clothing store. (Left: Abbie, Natasha and Dima checking prices in the supermarket.) This mall and others like it are part of the new Ukraine that I didn’t see two years ago. We’re not sure how these stores are going to make it, given the low salaries. Dima’s salary of $250 a month is about average for workers in Kiev, we were told. The minimum wage is around $50 a month. The supermarket had just about everything, including live fish in tanks for about €2 a kilo ($1.10 a pound)(right). The store’s “fisherman” was sitting behind the tanks reading a magazine, waiting on the next customer to place an order.