Random thoughts

For those of you getting ready to travel over, I wanted to share a few things we've experienced on our journey. It is much warmer than we expected, and apparently warmer than usual. Generally, the weather has been sunny and between 40 -60 degrees during the day. Until we got settled in to our apartment in Balta, we survived on peanut butter, oatmeal, fruit and bars. You may or may not have an apartment in which you can cook, so prepare accordingly. Once we were settled in to an apartment with a kitchen, we were fine with food. Lots of fresh fruits, some fresh veggies, lots of frozen veggies, and lots of lunch meats, eggs, and perogies.

We bought bottled water to drink, but I brushed my teeth with the tap water and have not gotten sick. Neither has Scott. Knock on wood. Also, I have been making tea, coffee and hot chocolate with the tap water, and we've been fine. Our water has not been brown and dirty though. Every place we've been has had a hot pot for boiling water, which has been great.

Bring more books and magazines than you think, because it won't be enough (unless you're traveling with your child). We ran out - I have one book left for the plane. It's really difficult to find anything in English. Scott has a video iPod, and burned lots of DVDs to it before we left, so we had 30 or so movies and tv shows to watch. He brought an AV connection and was able to run the movies through the televisions. We have not had any English tv since we've been here, and in Balta, there were only 3 local channels. Regular Kyiv television is better. We brought cards, and I brought an electronic crossword game as well as electronic soduku. Life savers, let me tell you.

The apartment building that we were in did have a washing machine, but charged $10 to do one load. We ended up washing most of our clothes in the apartment. You can buy laundry detergent anywhere. We bought a cell phone in country that was internet capable, but the charges for phone usage were outrageous. Don't do this if you think you'll be anywhere with an Internet cafe. It's only about $1- $2 U.S. dollars an hour at the cafes. The phone charges were also more than we thought, but we think there is some sort of glitch that we can't figure out with the phone and it's sucking down money. There are no cell phone charges for incoming calls, so provide your number to people so they can call you. Calling after 8pm also minimizes phone charges.

Hope some of these things help!