OUR FIRST FULL DAY

Bandura player

We ate. Then we took a city tour. Not as good as some, and they were having a big deal at the unknown soldier place, but we weren't allowed to park and get it because of the festivities. May Day is still a holiday here, and this year it's kind of closely matched up with Easter weekend.

This afternoon includes a tour of the catacombs, but it's not old ones, and it's a two hour bus ride each way, so we are going to the Ukrainian and Russian museum and then to the grocery store, looking for the "beautifully decorated Easter bread" which must be the Ukrainian custom. I'm eager for that. We might go to the church later tonight, maybe they'll be blessing Easter bread again.

The little cart the kid is in seems to be something you can rent here, because we also saw an empty one out in front of a shop, with no kids around. The man is playing a bandura, which is a beautiful sounding instrument. Later in the day we saw a violinist who literally ran around the block after the first time we passed him so he could get in front of us again when we got to the bus.
Zoe tried to get money out of the ATM, but kept getting an error message. After the third bank, she quit. So far she's had lost luggage, a password for computer that won't work, (though we have now solved that problem), and an ATM card that has given her a message that says "invalid transaction 4 out of 5 times. Thank god she brought plenty of Zoloft along.
On the plus side, her luggage arrived today. On the minus side, the receptionist chastised her when it arrived for not having informed them that it was lost and would be arriving today. The Viking representative who met us at the airport knew that, so if she knew that was their modes randy, she should have told the receptionist.
After the wonderful luggage arrival, we want to the Ukrainian and Russian art museum. It was a really good museum, though they have no money, I'm guessing, to make it an appropriate housing for the paintings they have. Their curatorial expertise seems to extend only to hanging cloths over works on paper, or perhaps watercolors, I couldn't quite figure out the common thread of why some paintings had a cloth hanging over it, but they mostly appeqred to be watercolor, or on paper, or things that were meant to be stage sets or book illustrations. All the paintings were by people with Russian-sounding names, though I'll be the first to admit I can't tell the difference between Russian and Ukrainian names. They had one full room of paintings by an artist named Kostandy so I tried to figure out if he was a local, but none of the babushkas manning the museum spoke any English.
They had quite a nice collection of Russians who must have studied with the French impressionists. Both the subjects and the styles were very familiar.
While we were there I had to go to the bathroom. I was directed outside the museum, but not intend to any of the specific doors that were outside. I passed door number 1 because I didn't notice it. Door number 2 had a big padlock on it, door #3 led not a courtyard that looked promising but didn't deliver, and door #4 led into a building with another four doors inside that led to workrooms, storage rooms and rooms with cleaning equipment before I found the door that led not a bathroom. After searching another two or three minutes for a light switch, I discovered that the room had not one piece of paper - no towels, no TP, no nothing. But it was otherwise clean and not a hole in the floor.
When we were ready to leave, we asked them to call us a taxi, "taxi" being the only word we had in common. You could tell it was a big imposition since it was time for her to go home, but she stayed with us for 20 minutes to be sure the taxi came. We had come by taxi and meant to walk home, but by the time we got there in the taxi, I couldn't figure it how we did it, and it seemed the better route to not wander around a strange city for two or three hours. And besides, we might have missed dinner!
Tomorrow we are going to town to the craft market in the morning, and on a Jewish tour in the afternoon. We will be in Odessa til 9 pm tomorrow night.