Ukraine, The

Which raises an interesting question.  Why "The Ukraine?"  Why do we always put that little article before the name?  Technically the country's name is "Ukraine."  I don't hear people saying they're traveling to The Germany, or The France.  The USA, but that's different.

Anyhoos...

These...well, they're chickens.  And they live next door to the Lynch family.  And they stare at you as you walk into the house, and they stare at you again as you leave the house.  It's rather comical.  And maybe a little creepy.
This is Thanksgiving dinner.  We had tons of fun helping out, first with the shopping, then with the cooking, and most especially with the eating.  We had not been sure at the beginning of our trip if we would actually get a Thanksgiving while we were out and about (whatever that phrase means), and we were quite happy and blessed to spend it with this wonderful family.
One of the few sightseeing things we did in Ukraine.  This is us with Olya, who showed us around and interpreted for us quite frequently.  She was fantastic.  Here we are taking a lift over a park there.  You couldn't see much of the city from there because of the trees, but you could see the outskirts.
This is a section of one of the hospitals where they keep babies abandoned by their mothers.  These babies lack the necessary paperwork to be adopted, so they have to stay in the hospital sometimes for as long as a year.  One of the women from the church runs a ministry that goes into these hospitals and holds and plays with these babies, as they receive little to no attention otherwise.  This little girl's name is Liza.
Apparently John's uncle creates his own instruments.  He just thinks up different kinds, and decides to make them.  You should check out his website: www.wowmusicalinstruments.com.  This particular instrument is a fretless bass made of just one piece of wood.  It was a beautiful instrument, and I enjoyed playing it a little, even though I don't play bass.  (By the way, yes I got my hair cut.  Tanya's mother is a beautician and was kind enough to give me a haircut!)
Ah, the family.  Here we all are, except for Aaron, the latest addition.  John, Tanya, Ariel, Elizabeth, Igor, Arlen, some girl, and Narco...er, I mean Soombir.  I call the cat Narco because he could just fall asleep at a moment's notice, and no matter how much you moved him, he'd just sort of...flop.  Ergo, Narco, short for Narcoleptic (perfectly fine one minute and then unconscious the next...hee hee!).  Warm fuzzies to anyone who can place that quote!
On our long long long train ride from Kiev to Bucharest, we were fortunate enough to be joined by two boxers named Julia and Svetlana, who were on their way to a competition in Bulgaria.  They spoke a little bit of English, and were so excited to practice with us, so we got grilled with every question they could think of.    :-)=  And I was able to show off my nine Russian words: hello, goodbye, thank you, please, sorry, yes, no, cheese, and my personal favourite, milk.  I would write them in Russian, but you couldn't read it.  Also, I don't have a Russian keyboard.  Also, I don't really know how to spell them.  But we don't talk about that.  Our most exciting bit of fun was when we were stuck at the entrance to Romania for an extra hour.  Unfortunately, there was a problem with the boxing group's visas, so it took a while to straighten all that out.

Did ew know...?

The train tracks in Ukraine are different from the rest of Europe, so they schedule two hours at the border both ways, where they lift the trains and change all of the wheels...every time.

Thank you for choosing Lod's Little Tidbits, and have a nice day.