A Day in Pushe

Since Lena is finished with her classes (and the other doesn't start for two weeks), we had a Saturday where neither of us had anything we had to do. Well, we don't have any hot water at home so we did go to the UEC to take showers. Lena also managed to find an absolutely fabulous deal for our vacation and settled that with the travel agent. After all that, we headed out to Pushe-Voditsa.

It's sort of hard to describe what Pushe-Voditsa is for my American readers. It's sort of like a recreation area outside the city in a wonderful forest. It's home to lots of abandoned buildings and dormitory-like structures that were once owned by various Soviet industries and organizations to give their workers a bit of rest. For example, if you worked for the railroad, you and your family might get a week or two at one of these sanatoriums. Free food and lodging and maybe some kind of medical treatment, drinking some kind of mineral water, or something like that. This area is now sort of struggling to figure out what to do with itself. There are several lakes and wonderful pine fragrances in the air, unlike the city aromas.

So we hung out there at a lake. I read about Kitty making strawberry jam in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Lena has started reading the lectures for her next class, statistics. We then decided to walk back to the main road and enjoy some shashlik, Armenian shishkabob, and this sort of roadside dive that we have been to numerous times, was always wonderful, and very cheap. Well, like everything else in Kyiv, they have raised their prices--13 UAH for 100 grams. Unbelievable. This place is sort of like one of those places where you buy boiled peanuts in western North Carolina. No toilet, sit on plastic lawn furniture, very rustic. But excellent food. The rustic theme is still intact but the prices have shot through the roof. We retreated to the city and ate downtown instead. The road there has also become a major thoroughfare. Just too many cars in Kyiv.

There was some kind of big concert downtown tonight and fireworks. I think many of the high schools had their graduations. A church council meeting tomorrow and I am preaching.