radio silence

Sorry that I didn't blog yesterday...we had a bit of a mishap with the
phone, which led to sixteen hours without internet, which caused quite
a bit of panic for me and my brother, since we are truly addicted.
Anyway, we are all still alive...although that may change with my
astonishing rate of mushroom consumption. In fact, the woman who made
us lunch today even called her mushroom dish 'chernobyl mushrooms',
which made me laugh.

Yesterday was Victory Day (aka V-E Day in the States), and so Vova and
his family came out to our place and barbecued. Today, we had lunch
with Yuri and his wife...Yuri was our translator during our first few
weeks in Ukraine, and we always suspected that he was providing
reports on us to the KGB, but he's a really nice guy and it was good
to see him. Then, Vova's dad took us to this big park in Uman, which
is 100 km south of here. It was quite impressive, although I would
like to know how many serfs were killed in the construction of the
park...they basically constructed all of these rock formations and
waterfalls to look natural, which couldn't have been an easy task
using the tools available 211 years ago.

On the way back to Bila Tserkva, our van was making a terrible noise,
so we may have transportation problems tomorrow. However, that is a
problem for another day...right now, I should go to bed!

P.S. Aunt Becky, we didn't see the radioactivity counter in the city
center...either they are trying to move on with their lives, or the
levels are so high that they don't even want to bother. Lenin's statue
survives.