Olya, while doing jumping jacks with her atavar on Simms, lost a baby molar tooth. We are paying for the dental bill to replace Maria’s teeth and Nikolai’s rotted teeth. The day after we made this decision, Pippa broke a rear molar from a shyslysk (shish kebob) pork morsel. Ron has a tooth that is beginning to ache, a tooth that he meant to fix in Miami but didn’t get around to the dentist.
Then there was the episode with Olya’s teeth retainer; we were having lunch at the restaurant in Taras Scheschenko Park and Olya took out her retainer to eat and folded it in her napkin. Of course she forgot the napkin and left the restaurant without it. Then busboy cleaned the table and we ended up going back to the restaurant when Olya remembered she didn’t have her retainer. A half hour later after going through every piece of garbage in the dumpster behind he restaurant, Andry found it. Our trip seems to be revolving around a theme of “teeth”.
The big question is does the Ukrainian Tooth Fairy leave a gold coin or a 20 hrivna note?
Does the Ukrainian Tooth Fairy leave notes in English, Russian or Ukrainian? Where should Olya leave her note? In her shoe? Under the pillow?
Well, we’ll find out I suppose.
This morning we went to the dentists’ hospital to make the next installment payment for Maria and Nikolai’s teeth extraction, repair and replacement. In an earlier post Ron described the dentists’ uniforms as looking like what American butchers wear. We’ve been to the hospital so many times Ron and the dentist are best buds so he felt comfortable asking if it would be okay to take a picture of the dentist. Here he is chest hair and all.
The children playing while waiting outside the front door of the hospital.
As we left on our way to lunch Vasilly said we were about to drive by his apartment complex and there was something he wanted show it to us.
Vasilly was an engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear plant when the 1986 disaster occured. We have gingerly asked him about the incident and its aftermath. He explained that two days after the melt down all the residents of Chernobyl were relocated to a large housing complex in Kiev. He still lives in the apartment and offered to show it to us. We would love to see his apartment but asked to see it on our next trip to the dentist because the children were starving.
He did pull into the complex to show us the statue commemorating all the Chernobyl workers. Here he and Yelana are posing in front of it.
All the Chernobyl workers are on disability now. About a dozen were sitting in the shade of a nearby tree playing dominoes; a scene you’d see on Calle Ocho.
Yelana told us that 21-24 year olds, who were babies at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, are the age group most affected from the nuclear fall out. Both of Vasilly’s children are in this group and suffer from a blood condition that makes them tire easily.
For lunch we went to a traditional Moldavian restaurant. The restaurant had several different eating environments to choose from. We considered the individual houses with their heavily carved doorways that were big enough for a table and six chairs.
And the room decorated with dozens of taxidermied animals.
But Olya and Andry decided we should sit on the long wide porch next to the waterfall. Yelana wanted a picture by the waterfall for her boyfriend.
While we waited for what seemed like years, the children played on the computers. The food was spicier than Ukrainian food and had heavier sauces. Glad we ate there once.
We gave the kids a choice for the afternoon: cinema or internet café? The kids opted for the internet café and played Grand Theft Auto, something we wouldn’t let them do if we were in the States but we are getting a bit desperate for activities. Pippa, Yelena and Ron went upstairs to the cinema lobby to have a coffee. We’ve both learned how to order “Kafe s Melokom”; the coffee at the cinema lobby is the best we’ve had in Kiev.
While having a coffee there, we got a call from the museum director (where we had the pysanky lesson a few days before). The director explained that she was telling a friend of hers about us, the Americans who took the egg–decorating lesson. The friend, who works for a radio station, told her boss and they got excited about doing a radio show around us. “Would we consider doing this” she asked? Sure, why not?!
But, what would they think if they knew we were also bringing the children’s biological Ukrainian parents to have a lesson with us? Would it blow their mind or add to their story? It blows our minds.
Maria and Nikolai gave this to us. It is the fast way to do Ukrainian egg decorating; more common now than the traditional wax painting/dying method. Just slip this plastic sleeve around the egg and with warm water shrink wrap the design to the egg.
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