Fun Facts about Ukraine:
Toilets: The train
station in Kiev was my first big Ukrainian toilet experience….and it was
definitely an experience. I had to pay to use it…so naturally I’m expecting
big things out of this bathroom. I get in there and I am not 100% sure where I
am to go because they aren’t your typical looking stalls. So I open a
door…and there is a porcelain hole in the ground. Yep… a squatty
potty….and no toilet paper. Awesome. Then there is the train…also a hole
but there is a toilet on top of the hole. You are not allowed to go to the
bathroom unless we are moving because it just falls down onto the tracks. If we
went while we were stopped at a station- the station would start to stink
pretty bad. Then there is camp. For toilet paper, we use party streamers and we
are not allowed to flush the tp because their “plumbing” can’t handle it. If
anybody knows me…you know that I can plug a toilet with the best of them. I
had to ask how to unplug the toilet here on day 1 of me going #2. Fill a bucket
of water and dump it down the toilet.
Food: Butter. Butter.
And more butter. We have bread and butter with every meal- which we have come
to love after we scrape the stick of butter off of it first. If we are lucky we
get a piece of cheese or some sort of slimy salami substance on our piece of
bread- called a sandwich. Beverage: either hot sweet tea, or smelly smoked fish
juice. Breakfast is a bowl with hot milk and BUTTER mixed and either has a tiny
amount of buckwheat, crushed corn, or white rice at the bottom. Or mush with a
stick of butter on top. Lunch is their big meal here. It is usually mashed
potatoes, and some sort of sketchy meat and borscht. A lot of times they will
have beets or some sort of cabbage mix as well. Dinner- we pray for mush these
days because if its mush then its not the dry cottage cheese egg sour cream
crunchy bake thing. Also they like to serve this thing we like to tell ourselves its bologna but who knows.
No smiling. BUT the people here at camp are great. I am definitely falling in
love with some of the kids here. Some of them are so tough but they still have
their moments of being a little kid like they should be. Most of the kids look
like they are 6 or 7 but they are actually 14 or 15. They are small, tough and
yet so precious.
