There's a book we have that's full of pictures of all different kinds of animals dressed as people. Since Anna's a master at animal noises, we like to go through the book and point to all the animals and hear her make the noises. One day when we were reading it, I pointed to a horse and she gave a resounding "Neeeiiigghhhh." Perfect. I pointed to a pig and she said, "Mama." Excuse me? We tried again and again and it always came out "Mama." I'm pretty sure I accused Trevor right away of teaching her to identify pigs as mama, but he denied it. So that led to a lot of jokes at my expense. Ha ha. I'm a big fat pig. Ha ha ha. I thought that maybe Anna thought the pig was a mama because the pig is wearing a dress, but that was just probably wishful thinking...
But then the other day I got my revenge. I was reading the Ensign when Anna wanted to sit on my lap. I picked her up and pointed out some pictures on the page I was reading. All on her own, she pointed to a picture of President Benson and said, "Dad." Ha.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
I'm it.
I knew it was inevitable. Since I was like the last person in the world to get a blog, I'm like the only person left who hasn't been tagged. :D So anyway. Here it is.
A: The rules of the game are posted at the beginning. B: Each player answers the questions about themselves. C: At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blog and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog. (Or not...)
10 years ago:
I was sporting braces and a drivers license (a lethal combination) as a sophomore at Lone Peak High School.
On my to-do list:
Figure out what to make for 40 people for dinner on Sunday, shop for the food, and somehow transport it to the church this weekend. Oh, and then go crazy.
5 places that I've lived:
Highland, UT
Good ol Monticello Apartments (say that with an 's' instead of a 'ch' sound—that's how the locals did it), Provo, UT
"The Dev" (I hated this nickname for the Devonshire Apartments, but I also hated how everyone would call it DevonSHYER because I had just returned from England and that's NOT how the locals say it...), Provo, UT
London, England (on study abroad)
Lodz, Poland
5 jobs i have had:
Sundae/sandwich maker, Thanksgiving Point Soda Fountain, Lehi, UT (my first real job — I broke a million plates on my first day and accidentally served a family a round of disgusting soda water)
HEPE secretary, BYU, Provo, UT (This was for the GE Health and Physical Education class, but most people thought I was calling myself the Happy Secretary)
Free-lance editor
Writer for the Life & Style section of the Daily Herald, Provo, UT (Man, I miss those perks...getting into concerts and restaurants for free, all in the name of journalism)
Personal Manager, for Trevor and Anna, all the time (some people might call me a personal assistant, but I prefer to call it "managing")
What I would do if I became a Billionaire:
go shopping, hire a personal chef for the nights I don't feel like cooking, fly home for a visit, and donate to some charities so I don't feel so selfish
Bad Habits:
waiting until the last possible dish is dirty before I do the dishes
Things I really enjoy:
Trevor, Anna, reading, writing, laughing, playing games
Things people don't know about me:
someday I will write a book. I don't know what it will be about, but I'll write one.
Now I get to pick five people: I'm going to opt out of this one.
A: The rules of the game are posted at the beginning. B: Each player answers the questions about themselves. C: At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blog and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog. (Or not...)
10 years ago:
I was sporting braces and a drivers license (a lethal combination) as a sophomore at Lone Peak High School.
On my to-do list:
Figure out what to make for 40 people for dinner on Sunday, shop for the food, and somehow transport it to the church this weekend. Oh, and then go crazy.
5 places that I've lived:
Highland, UT
Good ol Monticello Apartments (say that with an 's' instead of a 'ch' sound—that's how the locals did it), Provo, UT
"The Dev" (I hated this nickname for the Devonshire Apartments, but I also hated how everyone would call it DevonSHYER because I had just returned from England and that's NOT how the locals say it...), Provo, UT
London, England (on study abroad)
Lodz, Poland
5 jobs i have had:
Sundae/sandwich maker, Thanksgiving Point Soda Fountain, Lehi, UT (my first real job — I broke a million plates on my first day and accidentally served a family a round of disgusting soda water)
HEPE secretary, BYU, Provo, UT (This was for the GE Health and Physical Education class, but most people thought I was calling myself the Happy Secretary)
Free-lance editor
Writer for the Life & Style section of the Daily Herald, Provo, UT (Man, I miss those perks...getting into concerts and restaurants for free, all in the name of journalism)
Personal Manager, for Trevor and Anna, all the time (some people might call me a personal assistant, but I prefer to call it "managing")
What I would do if I became a Billionaire:
go shopping, hire a personal chef for the nights I don't feel like cooking, fly home for a visit, and donate to some charities so I don't feel so selfish
Bad Habits:
waiting until the last possible dish is dirty before I do the dishes
Things I really enjoy:
Trevor, Anna, reading, writing, laughing, playing games
Things people don't know about me:
someday I will write a book. I don't know what it will be about, but I'll write one.
Now I get to pick five people: I'm going to opt out of this one.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
My first day back in the real world
While our trip to Ukraine was a riot (see previous post), I think I picked up some strange illness while we were there and then promptly passed it on to Anna and Trevor. Luckily, Anna didn't get the worst of it, because it was bad. It was like the worst parts of the flu and a cold, all combined into one disgusting mess. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that this was the sickest I've been in years. Trevor and I were out of commission for a week and a half. All we could do was lie in bed and watch movies—while Anna ran free. I know it doesn't sound that different from what we normally do :D, but this time we had fevers and terrible TB coughs. Trevor and I had to take turns stumbling out to the store to stock up on supplies, and all of the people at the store, at least when I was there, were giving me dirty looks every time I coughed. I tried to be inconspicuous, but when you've got TB, you've got TB.
Anyway, while these afflictions did give us some insight into what the world of Polish convenience food has to offer (bottled meatballs, for exmple), I was ready to get things back to normal. So yesterday I decided Anna and I would take a trip to Leclerc, the big hypermarket about 15 minutes from our apartment. We needed real food, so it was time for a big shop.
All went well until the check-out line. (This is frequently the site where I'm confronted with how little Polish I know. There always seems to be a problem with something I'm buying, and since I can't communicate all that well, I just end up looking like a fool, staring blankly when they ask me questions. At the end of it all, I usually just wave the product away and wonder why they won't let me buy it. On top of that is the added pressure of having to bag your own groceries, and people get quite antsy when you've already paid but you're still bagging away.) Anyway, while I'm frantically trying to bag my groceries and load up the stroller, there's a problem with the flashlight I'm trying to buy. This uncomfortable process involved the manager, assistant manager, twice, and lots of time waiting for these people to assist us. I basically had no idea what was going on, but I did tell the people in line that I was sorry (in Polish—that should give me some bonus points) and I hoped that would smooth things over. (Luckily, I had PLENTY of time to finish bagging the groceries. No problems there.)
So, once the flashlight was purchased, we were on our way. It was getting dark by this time, so I tried to hurry home as fast as I could. I guess I had taken for granted just how much water the stroller could hold (this time 12 liters plus the groceries), because when I went up one curb, one of the back wheels fell off. Awesome. I found the wheel and then pulled out my trusty/new flashlight and searched for other missing parts. I couldn't find any, so I put the wheel back on, only to have it fall off again after just a few feet. This is how we made it home. We didn't stroll, we hobbled. It took me twice as long, but we eventually made it. When I got close to our apartment, I called Trevor to see if he was home from a church meeting so he could help us up the stairs. Sadly, he was still at the church. Before I even got a chance to tell him about the stroller mishap I was currently struggling with, a friend in the branch got on the phone and asked me to cook the Break the Fast dinner next week for the branch. Wow. I would have been a little more excited about this had I not been essentially carrying a 100-pound stroller at the time I found out, but still. It's going to be quite a feat to cook for 30-40 Polish people. I'm excited to share some American food with them, but there's all this pressure to make it taste good, on a budget, and everything. Ah, what to make...what to make...
Anyway, for my first day back in the real world, it was rough times. Awkwardness at the grocery store, hobbling home with a handicapped stroller, and then being asked to cook for 40 people... I was ready to go home. Oh, but wait. I still had to figure out how to get the three-wheeled stroller up three flights of stairs. Ah, good times.
This whole experience called to mind a similar and much funnier story my sister Jen told, illustrating just what an adventure simple grocery shopping, without a car, can be.
Anyway, while these afflictions did give us some insight into what the world of Polish convenience food has to offer (bottled meatballs, for exmple), I was ready to get things back to normal. So yesterday I decided Anna and I would take a trip to Leclerc, the big hypermarket about 15 minutes from our apartment. We needed real food, so it was time for a big shop.
All went well until the check-out line. (This is frequently the site where I'm confronted with how little Polish I know. There always seems to be a problem with something I'm buying, and since I can't communicate all that well, I just end up looking like a fool, staring blankly when they ask me questions. At the end of it all, I usually just wave the product away and wonder why they won't let me buy it. On top of that is the added pressure of having to bag your own groceries, and people get quite antsy when you've already paid but you're still bagging away.) Anyway, while I'm frantically trying to bag my groceries and load up the stroller, there's a problem with the flashlight I'm trying to buy. This uncomfortable process involved the manager, assistant manager, twice, and lots of time waiting for these people to assist us. I basically had no idea what was going on, but I did tell the people in line that I was sorry (in Polish—that should give me some bonus points) and I hoped that would smooth things over. (Luckily, I had PLENTY of time to finish bagging the groceries. No problems there.)
So, once the flashlight was purchased, we were on our way. It was getting dark by this time, so I tried to hurry home as fast as I could. I guess I had taken for granted just how much water the stroller could hold (this time 12 liters plus the groceries), because when I went up one curb, one of the back wheels fell off. Awesome. I found the wheel and then pulled out my trusty/new flashlight and searched for other missing parts. I couldn't find any, so I put the wheel back on, only to have it fall off again after just a few feet. This is how we made it home. We didn't stroll, we hobbled. It took me twice as long, but we eventually made it. When I got close to our apartment, I called Trevor to see if he was home from a church meeting so he could help us up the stairs. Sadly, he was still at the church. Before I even got a chance to tell him about the stroller mishap I was currently struggling with, a friend in the branch got on the phone and asked me to cook the Break the Fast dinner next week for the branch. Wow. I would have been a little more excited about this had I not been essentially carrying a 100-pound stroller at the time I found out, but still. It's going to be quite a feat to cook for 30-40 Polish people. I'm excited to share some American food with them, but there's all this pressure to make it taste good, on a budget, and everything. Ah, what to make...what to make...
Anyway, for my first day back in the real world, it was rough times. Awkwardness at the grocery store, hobbling home with a handicapped stroller, and then being asked to cook for 40 people... I was ready to go home. Oh, but wait. I still had to figure out how to get the three-wheeled stroller up three flights of stairs. Ah, good times.
This whole experience called to mind a similar and much funnier story my sister Jen told, illustrating just what an adventure simple grocery shopping, without a car, can be.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Our Ukrainian Adventures
Last weekend it was that time again — time to flee the country — so we took a short trip to Ukraine. (Why is it that I want to say "the Ukraine"? I keep hearing Miss Teen Whoever saying "the Iraq" over and over in my head and I'm trying my hardest to keep from sounding like her.) Anyway, we had to leave the country again so that our 90-day allotted stay was renewed so that Anna and I would have enough time to apply for temporary residency permits. Super long and complicated story, but that's why we had to leave the country.
Anyhow, it was an adventure-a-minute kind of trip, so get ready. It all started Saturday afternoon...
SATURDAY
1 p.m.: We took the train to Warsaw to see the worldwide leadership training broadcast, which was amazing.
3 p.m.: We arrived in Warsaw and Trevor searched for a bank to withdraw some money for our trip while I walked around the giganto mall with Anna and coveted all of the cool clothes and shoes. Man, we need to come back when I have some money to spend.
4:30 p.m.: We were in a huge rush to get to the chapel, but we were starving. Because Trevor was busy looking over the millions of movies they sell in the train stations for like $2, literally, I was in charge of getting us some food. I went to a little stand and ordered a half of a baguette with mushrooms and cheese on it (the Polish word for it escapes me) and a cheeseburger. To my surprise, they put two patties of some kind of meat on each side of the bun and filled the middle with shredded purple and white cabbage and carrots, and topped it with a red sauce, white sauce, and a yellow sauce that was not mustard. It was strangely tasty but difficult to eat. You had to hold it like an ice cream cone and it would have been much easier to eat with a fork, but we managed.
Okay, so that really has nothing to do with our trip to Ukraine. I just wanted to tell you about the crazy cheeseburger. Not much happened until the next evening, so fast forward to SUNDAY EVENING for the rest of our adventures.
9:15 p.m.: We boarded the night train headed to Kovel, Ukraine, not really having any idea what we were in for. Instead of stamping our tickets like we're used to, they took our tickets. So we had no proof of why we were on the train. That was a little unnerving. But we didn't let that get us down. Here are some pictures of the good time we were having.
We had a cabin all to ourselves, with two bunk beds, but we weren't sure where to have Anna sleep. The beds weren't an option, because I'm sure she would have rolled off, so we lifted up one of the bottom beds and found a cubby for storing luggage. This seemed perfect. We wiped it down, laid down a mattress pad they provided, and put her to bed.
MONDAY
1:00 a.m.: We were woken up by the Polish border control guards, who all have guns and look super intimidating (especially at 1 a.m.), so they could check our tickets and passports. They knock on your door and let you know they'll be coming in a few minutes so you can get everything ready. Anna slept through it all, and looked so cute in her tiny cubby, that I snapped a picture. (See below.)
I was looking at the pictures I took on my camera when the guard came to our door. He thought I was recording him and got quite upset (in Polish, so I didn't really know what was going on), but Trevor quickly filled me in and I quickly put the camera away and things were fine. But that was kind of scary.
As the guard looked over our three passports, Trevor pointed out where Anna was sleeping so he could check her photo. He got upset again, asking us why we hid her like that (because of the tiny cubby), and then Trevor said, "Where else are we supposed to put her?" (I'm SO glad he knows Polish so well. We probably would have been deported on the spot if I had been doing the talking.) Anyway, the guard left and all was well.
2 a.m..: The Ukrainian border guard came to our door and woke us up so he could check our passports. Trevor asked him to be quiet because Anna was asleep, but as he said it the guard turned on the lights. The guard looked down and saw Anna was there and said, "Oh. Baby." By this time, Anna had woken up. The guard asked, "Why isn't she sleeping?" Trevor said, "Because you woke her up. You turned on the lights and opened the door. As soon as you came, you woke her up." The guard then said, "Ah, I see. She doesn't want to sleep." Trevor said to me later that it was then that he realized that the man didn't speak Polish.
The guard made us fill out forms stating why we were going to Kovel, and we had to provide an address of where we were going to be staying. We weren't planning on staying that long, but that would look a little shifty if we said were going to come back in a few hours. So the night before we left, we searched all over the internet for the address of a hotel in Kovel. There was none to be found, but we did find that some monument or something was located on Independence Street. So we wrote that our purpose for being there was "tourism" and that our destination was "hotel" at the address " Independence Street" — and the guard didn't seem to have a problem with that.
But then they took our passports and didn't bring them back. We had no tickets to show, we had no passports, and we started to get a little worried. The Ukrainian guard was a happy, go-lucky guy who looked throughly through each of our passports, but then he said "thank you" and took them away. The Polish guard may have been strict and mean, but at least he gave our passports back. The Ukrainian guard eventually brought our passports back a couple hours later, so all was well.
3 a.m.: Because the train tracks are different in Poland (and the rest of Western Europe) and Ukraine, they had to stop our train, raise each car a few feet into the air, and change the wheels to fit the new tracks. This was about a three-hour process that we luckily slept through.
6:10 a.m.: We arrived.
7 a.m.: We wandered around the train station for awhile, wondering how we were going to purchase our return tickets for 3 p.m. While it's somewhat exciting to be in a completely new place, it's also a horrible feeling going to some remote location and not speaking the language. The alphabet is totally different too, so we couldn't even really recognize any similar words or anything. Luckily a few people here and there spoke a little Polish, so Trevor managed to get us some tickets after withdrawing 600 Ukrainian whatevers from an ATM. We had no idea what the name of their currency was or even the exchange rate. (This was totally dumb on our part and will not be repeated again. While it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment trip, we will definitely do our homework next time.) So we paid 500 Ukrainian hryvnia (but I'll call them dollars for our purposes here) for the tickets and had 100 left over for the rest of the day.
8 a.m. We set out to go find some food of some sort and were totally shocked by how insanely cold it was outside. Honestly, it may have surpassed how frozen we were during The Slapper from the girls trip to NY in February of 2004. (That's how the wind felt on our faces on that trip, by the way. Like a good slap.) Both Trevor and I agreed that it was the coldest we had ever been. We left the train station and saw that a huge bazaar or market was located right next to it. We wandered through it and then went down a few side streets to see if we could find a restaurant of some kind. Again, we couldn't read any of the signs and we had no idea where to look for a restaurant. We finally wandered into a small convenience store and purchased some fruit, a yogurt drink, and potato chips (a delicious breakfast) by pointing at them and Trevor saying the words in Polish. (We figured Polish was a whole lot closer to Ukrainian than English.) We wanted to check out the rest of the city, but it was way too cold. Anna, who refuses to keep her mittens on, kept crying out "Cold, cold" every few minutes. So that told us it was time to go back into the train station to eat our breakfast.
Here is the one and only picture I took in Kovel. This church was right next to the train station, which is basically why it's the only picture I have. But I loved the church because it was so cute and small, and yet it also had this elaborate gate around it.
9 a.m.: We found some seats next to a barber shop in the train station and we ate our breakfast (don't ever buy a yogurt drink that's chocolate-orange flavored — I'm not typically a picky eater, but I could only handle two swallows) and tried to warm up a bit. It was pretty entertaining to watch people go into the barber shop with long hair and then see what they looked like when they came out.
10 a.m.-12 p.m.: Trevor and I took turns taking naps because we were SO exhausted. I had absolutely no trouble sleeping sitting up. Later I had to go to the bathroom, so after some wandering I found what I thought was the bathroom. When I walked in, there was this giant empty room, except for a lady at a desk, with two rooms off to the side, which I saw were the men's and women's bathrooms. I saw people paying the lady at the desk and then going into the bathroom, so I went up to her and held out a 50-cent coin. I thought I saw a sign that that said the fee was 10 cents, but the lady nodded her head no and spoke to me in Ukrainian. I just held out all my money (it was like two dollar bills and a couple more coins) and let her take what she needed. I felt totally useless and dumb, but at least I could go to the bathroom. I headed into the women's section, but the lady pointed me toward the one roll of toilet paper hanging on the wall. So I grabbed some and THEN headed into the stall. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the toilet was actually a hole in the ground. But it wasn't your average hole in the ground — it was a porcelain hole. There were ridged edges for your feet to keep you from slipping and everything (yuck). So yeah. That was good times.
12 p.m.: We thought it must be a bit warmer now that it was after noon, so we ventured outside to the market. We had no idea how enormous it was, and it was a complete maze. So many little stalls selling EVERYTHING you could imagine, from baked goods to scarves, from laundry detergent to pasta, from car parts to wallpaper. We had about 100 Ukranian dollars to spend, so we bought anything we remotely fancied. (We found out later that the exchange rate is about 5:1. So for $20, we bought breakfast and lunch, a hat, six decks of Russian playing cards, an apron, a cute pear-shaped cutting board, a wooden rolling back massager thing, a pastry, and a waffle cone filled with candied puff cereal — an interesting, but tasty, treat. Not so bad for $20, huh? Especially when Trevor had to pay extra for a plastic bag to carry our food in.)
2 p.m. This brings me to lunch. We were very hungry by this time and we were ready to eat anything. We scoured the city square for a restaurant and then I saw that a couple of signs had a word that looked similar to "kafe," just with an extra crazy letter, so we decided to check it out. We went in and looked at the menu, but, strangely enough, we couldn't read a thing. There was a case of food near the front so Trevor did his best to point to things and tell the girl, who kept giggling the whole time, how many we wanted. He pointed at the pickles and told her we wanted four (we were starving), so the girl put four on a plate and then put the plate back in the case. What? It was too hard to communicate, so we came away with four little meat patties and two slices of bread and two open-faced sandwiches topped with salami and thick slabs of cheese. Or what we thought was cheese. It was the kind of cheese that Americans call butter. When Trevor was "ordering" the food, or playing charades, it was so funny to see him try to ask/act out if the food could be warmed up. "Outside, cold. Inside, hot. Food, hot." Ah, good times. He's such a good sport. And to top it all off, we're not even sure if we ended up paying for the pickles, but we're pretty sure we never ate them.
3:40 p.m.: We boarded the train and found that they had given us first class tickets, so our cabin was extra nice with a little chair and a mirror and velvet-covered beds. It was a nice surprise, but we still had 9 hours to go and this time we weren't going to sleep the whole way...
We all took naps, at one point or another, and then Trevor and I pulled out a new deck of cards for some gin rummy (our game of choice, as of late). Not only were the cards super thin, maybe a little stronger than a piece of paper, but the decks were missing numbers 2-5. Awesome.
5:00 p.m.: This time we got to see in the daylight how they hoisted up our train car to change the wheels. The picture doesn't show very much and it's blurry because we were still moving a little, but it'll sort of give you an idea of what the gigantic garage was like.
11:10 p.m.: We arrived in Warsaw, took a taxi to Magda and Darek's apartment, Anna threw up, and then we went to bed. Pretty eventful day, wouldn't you say?
This was my cool artsy photo that I took of us on the train back to Lodz the next day. I just put this one up here because I thought it was cool.
Anyhow, it was an adventure-a-minute kind of trip, so get ready. It all started Saturday afternoon...
SATURDAY
1 p.m.: We took the train to Warsaw to see the worldwide leadership training broadcast, which was amazing.
3 p.m.: We arrived in Warsaw and Trevor searched for a bank to withdraw some money for our trip while I walked around the giganto mall with Anna and coveted all of the cool clothes and shoes. Man, we need to come back when I have some money to spend.
4:30 p.m.: We were in a huge rush to get to the chapel, but we were starving. Because Trevor was busy looking over the millions of movies they sell in the train stations for like $2, literally, I was in charge of getting us some food. I went to a little stand and ordered a half of a baguette with mushrooms and cheese on it (the Polish word for it escapes me) and a cheeseburger. To my surprise, they put two patties of some kind of meat on each side of the bun and filled the middle with shredded purple and white cabbage and carrots, and topped it with a red sauce, white sauce, and a yellow sauce that was not mustard. It was strangely tasty but difficult to eat. You had to hold it like an ice cream cone and it would have been much easier to eat with a fork, but we managed.
Okay, so that really has nothing to do with our trip to Ukraine. I just wanted to tell you about the crazy cheeseburger. Not much happened until the next evening, so fast forward to SUNDAY EVENING for the rest of our adventures.
9:15 p.m.: We boarded the night train headed to Kovel, Ukraine, not really having any idea what we were in for. Instead of stamping our tickets like we're used to, they took our tickets. So we had no proof of why we were on the train. That was a little unnerving. But we didn't let that get us down. Here are some pictures of the good time we were having.
We had a cabin all to ourselves, with two bunk beds, but we weren't sure where to have Anna sleep. The beds weren't an option, because I'm sure she would have rolled off, so we lifted up one of the bottom beds and found a cubby for storing luggage. This seemed perfect. We wiped it down, laid down a mattress pad they provided, and put her to bed.
MONDAY
1:00 a.m.: We were woken up by the Polish border control guards, who all have guns and look super intimidating (especially at 1 a.m.), so they could check our tickets and passports. They knock on your door and let you know they'll be coming in a few minutes so you can get everything ready. Anna slept through it all, and looked so cute in her tiny cubby, that I snapped a picture. (See below.)
I was looking at the pictures I took on my camera when the guard came to our door. He thought I was recording him and got quite upset (in Polish, so I didn't really know what was going on), but Trevor quickly filled me in and I quickly put the camera away and things were fine. But that was kind of scary.
As the guard looked over our three passports, Trevor pointed out where Anna was sleeping so he could check her photo. He got upset again, asking us why we hid her like that (because of the tiny cubby), and then Trevor said, "Where else are we supposed to put her?" (I'm SO glad he knows Polish so well. We probably would have been deported on the spot if I had been doing the talking.) Anyway, the guard left and all was well.
2 a.m..: The Ukrainian border guard came to our door and woke us up so he could check our passports. Trevor asked him to be quiet because Anna was asleep, but as he said it the guard turned on the lights. The guard looked down and saw Anna was there and said, "Oh. Baby." By this time, Anna had woken up. The guard asked, "Why isn't she sleeping?" Trevor said, "Because you woke her up. You turned on the lights and opened the door. As soon as you came, you woke her up." The guard then said, "Ah, I see. She doesn't want to sleep." Trevor said to me later that it was then that he realized that the man didn't speak Polish.
The guard made us fill out forms stating why we were going to Kovel, and we had to provide an address of where we were going to be staying. We weren't planning on staying that long, but that would look a little shifty if we said were going to come back in a few hours. So the night before we left, we searched all over the internet for the address of a hotel in Kovel. There was none to be found, but we did find that some monument or something was located on Independence Street. So we wrote that our purpose for being there was "tourism" and that our destination was "hotel" at the address " Independence Street" — and the guard didn't seem to have a problem with that.
But then they took our passports and didn't bring them back. We had no tickets to show, we had no passports, and we started to get a little worried. The Ukrainian guard was a happy, go-lucky guy who looked throughly through each of our passports, but then he said "thank you" and took them away. The Polish guard may have been strict and mean, but at least he gave our passports back. The Ukrainian guard eventually brought our passports back a couple hours later, so all was well.
3 a.m.: Because the train tracks are different in Poland (and the rest of Western Europe) and Ukraine, they had to stop our train, raise each car a few feet into the air, and change the wheels to fit the new tracks. This was about a three-hour process that we luckily slept through.
6:10 a.m.: We arrived.
7 a.m.: We wandered around the train station for awhile, wondering how we were going to purchase our return tickets for 3 p.m. While it's somewhat exciting to be in a completely new place, it's also a horrible feeling going to some remote location and not speaking the language. The alphabet is totally different too, so we couldn't even really recognize any similar words or anything. Luckily a few people here and there spoke a little Polish, so Trevor managed to get us some tickets after withdrawing 600 Ukrainian whatevers from an ATM. We had no idea what the name of their currency was or even the exchange rate. (This was totally dumb on our part and will not be repeated again. While it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment trip, we will definitely do our homework next time.) So we paid 500 Ukrainian hryvnia (but I'll call them dollars for our purposes here) for the tickets and had 100 left over for the rest of the day.
8 a.m. We set out to go find some food of some sort and were totally shocked by how insanely cold it was outside. Honestly, it may have surpassed how frozen we were during The Slapper from the girls trip to NY in February of 2004. (That's how the wind felt on our faces on that trip, by the way. Like a good slap.) Both Trevor and I agreed that it was the coldest we had ever been. We left the train station and saw that a huge bazaar or market was located right next to it. We wandered through it and then went down a few side streets to see if we could find a restaurant of some kind. Again, we couldn't read any of the signs and we had no idea where to look for a restaurant. We finally wandered into a small convenience store and purchased some fruit, a yogurt drink, and potato chips (a delicious breakfast) by pointing at them and Trevor saying the words in Polish. (We figured Polish was a whole lot closer to Ukrainian than English.) We wanted to check out the rest of the city, but it was way too cold. Anna, who refuses to keep her mittens on, kept crying out "Cold, cold" every few minutes. So that told us it was time to go back into the train station to eat our breakfast.
Here is the one and only picture I took in Kovel. This church was right next to the train station, which is basically why it's the only picture I have. But I loved the church because it was so cute and small, and yet it also had this elaborate gate around it.
9 a.m.: We found some seats next to a barber shop in the train station and we ate our breakfast (don't ever buy a yogurt drink that's chocolate-orange flavored — I'm not typically a picky eater, but I could only handle two swallows) and tried to warm up a bit. It was pretty entertaining to watch people go into the barber shop with long hair and then see what they looked like when they came out.
10 a.m.-12 p.m.: Trevor and I took turns taking naps because we were SO exhausted. I had absolutely no trouble sleeping sitting up. Later I had to go to the bathroom, so after some wandering I found what I thought was the bathroom. When I walked in, there was this giant empty room, except for a lady at a desk, with two rooms off to the side, which I saw were the men's and women's bathrooms. I saw people paying the lady at the desk and then going into the bathroom, so I went up to her and held out a 50-cent coin. I thought I saw a sign that that said the fee was 10 cents, but the lady nodded her head no and spoke to me in Ukrainian. I just held out all my money (it was like two dollar bills and a couple more coins) and let her take what she needed. I felt totally useless and dumb, but at least I could go to the bathroom. I headed into the women's section, but the lady pointed me toward the one roll of toilet paper hanging on the wall. So I grabbed some and THEN headed into the stall. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the toilet was actually a hole in the ground. But it wasn't your average hole in the ground — it was a porcelain hole. There were ridged edges for your feet to keep you from slipping and everything (yuck). So yeah. That was good times.
12 p.m.: We thought it must be a bit warmer now that it was after noon, so we ventured outside to the market. We had no idea how enormous it was, and it was a complete maze. So many little stalls selling EVERYTHING you could imagine, from baked goods to scarves, from laundry detergent to pasta, from car parts to wallpaper. We had about 100 Ukranian dollars to spend, so we bought anything we remotely fancied. (We found out later that the exchange rate is about 5:1. So for $20, we bought breakfast and lunch, a hat, six decks of Russian playing cards, an apron, a cute pear-shaped cutting board, a wooden rolling back massager thing, a pastry, and a waffle cone filled with candied puff cereal — an interesting, but tasty, treat. Not so bad for $20, huh? Especially when Trevor had to pay extra for a plastic bag to carry our food in.)
2 p.m. This brings me to lunch. We were very hungry by this time and we were ready to eat anything. We scoured the city square for a restaurant and then I saw that a couple of signs had a word that looked similar to "kafe," just with an extra crazy letter, so we decided to check it out. We went in and looked at the menu, but, strangely enough, we couldn't read a thing. There was a case of food near the front so Trevor did his best to point to things and tell the girl, who kept giggling the whole time, how many we wanted. He pointed at the pickles and told her we wanted four (we were starving), so the girl put four on a plate and then put the plate back in the case. What? It was too hard to communicate, so we came away with four little meat patties and two slices of bread and two open-faced sandwiches topped with salami and thick slabs of cheese. Or what we thought was cheese. It was the kind of cheese that Americans call butter. When Trevor was "ordering" the food, or playing charades, it was so funny to see him try to ask/act out if the food could be warmed up. "Outside, cold. Inside, hot. Food, hot." Ah, good times. He's such a good sport. And to top it all off, we're not even sure if we ended up paying for the pickles, but we're pretty sure we never ate them.
3:40 p.m.: We boarded the train and found that they had given us first class tickets, so our cabin was extra nice with a little chair and a mirror and velvet-covered beds. It was a nice surprise, but we still had 9 hours to go and this time we weren't going to sleep the whole way...
We all took naps, at one point or another, and then Trevor and I pulled out a new deck of cards for some gin rummy (our game of choice, as of late). Not only were the cards super thin, maybe a little stronger than a piece of paper, but the decks were missing numbers 2-5. Awesome.
5:00 p.m.: This time we got to see in the daylight how they hoisted up our train car to change the wheels. The picture doesn't show very much and it's blurry because we were still moving a little, but it'll sort of give you an idea of what the gigantic garage was like.
11:10 p.m.: We arrived in Warsaw, took a taxi to Magda and Darek's apartment, Anna threw up, and then we went to bed. Pretty eventful day, wouldn't you say?
This was my cool artsy photo that I took of us on the train back to Lodz the next day. I just put this one up here because I thought it was cool.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Anna's word book
So here's a little movie that shows much of Anna's vocabulary. I point to stuff in her favorite word book and she tells me what the pictures are. Watching it again, I now realize that you may not be able to understand what she's saying at all, but it sounds as clear as can be to us because we hear her words for things all day. For instance, would you know that "me" actually means "milk"? Yeah, I didn't think so. But that's common knowledge around here. Anyway, I usually repeat the word after she says it, so at least you can sort of figure out what she's saying.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure this little movie classifies as one of those things that parents think is the cutest thing ever and everyone else thinks is Stale City. Sorry about that. But for the true Anna die hards (grandparents, this one's for you), now you can see how many words the little smarty knows. And, most importantly, now you can see the real Anna, the one who is happy and animated and chatty, not the mute she seems to become when we do the videophone.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure this little movie classifies as one of those things that parents think is the cutest thing ever and everyone else thinks is Stale City. Sorry about that. But for the true Anna die hards (grandparents, this one's for you), now you can see how many words the little smarty knows. And, most importantly, now you can see the real Anna, the one who is happy and animated and chatty, not the mute she seems to become when we do the videophone.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Oh, heavenly day
Today's been good, but yesterday was actually the heavenly day I'm talking about. So I happen to LOVE a good bunch of grapes. (Trevor's parents and grandma have taken this to heart and, for family get-togethers, will buy grapes especially for me. I love them for that, among many other things.) Anyway, since we've been in Poland, I've tried to not let it get me down that the grapes here are not seedless, not that good, and super expensive. I stopped buying them months ago because they got up to about $5 a pound. It just wasn't worth it.Until yesterday.
I went to the store down the street from our apartment and saw that they had their sales posted up on the window. I glanced at the sign and saw that SEEDLESS grapes were on sale. I bought a big bag for us, because they were very cheap, and they are delicious. It may seem like nothing to you, but the grapes have warmed my heart and they've probably brought a little warmth to the rest of the chilly country, too. The next time you go to your fancy supermarkets, take a minute to appreciate how we often take the word "seedless" for granted and then buy some grapes and write me an email about how much better you feel about yourself and humanity.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Getting to know Lodz
I have taken a few pictures as we've been about the city and thought it might be fun for you to see more about where we live. But first a few stats:
This is at a small park near the train station on Christmas day. We were waiting here for our bus when Anna decided to have a standoff with the pigeons.
- Lodz (again, pronounced like WOODGE, as in "to woo" and the -dge ending of "judge") is Poland's second largest city with a population of 767,000.
- The city is located basically in the center of the country, and it's about a 90-minute train ride from Warsaw.
- At more than 5 km in length, the famous Piotrkowska Street is the longest commercial street in the world.
- Apparently Max Factor, of cosmetics fame, lives here. Who knew?
- I just found out that we live in the part of the city known as the Jewish ghetto. Awesome. It sounds worse than it is, but that's interesting, huh?
The Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Church
This is a church we pass on our way to Manufactura, the big mall near where we live. It also looks really cool at night because of its lights, but I don't have a picture of that.
I don't exactly remember why I took this picture, but at least it gives you a taste of what the rest of the buildings look like that aren't churches.
This is at a small park near the train station on Christmas day. We were waiting here for our bus when Anna decided to have a standoff with the pigeons.
The standoff.
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