Up in the morning and off to work. Oleh makes the minivan dance around over the cratered road surface to the office. Nailing down the last details of last night’s emergency work, I have a clean deck to finish my collaboration with the Ukrainians today. A few hours of brainstorming, outlining, and writing — then a drive to lunch at the prosthetics factory cafeteria — then back to it and we finish the day with an excellent result. I’ll polish up the document tonight and tomorrow morning, and review it with the whole team in the afternoon. The trip is working out well from a work perspective.
Back at the hotel at dinnertime, I am getting a bit hungry. So I head over to Amadeus, one of the best restaurants in town. But it seems odd to be going out to wonderful dining with no company; and then I have to deal with how to expense the bill, so I decide to just go back to the (excellent, mind you) hotel restaurant. Hmmm. Chicken Kiev really is a Ukrainian specialty, but only visitors actually eat it. What the heck, I tell myself, and end up with a delicious plate of pesto-butter-filled breaded chicken breast. Soup first, of course!
A couple is at the next table speaking Ukrainian or Russian; it’s hard for me to know which. She’s a fashionably skinny bleach blonde and he looks something like a slavic Nicolas Cage in a leather jacket. At one point he leaves for about 20 minutes and she stays behind; I get the impression she’s upset. Eventually he returns, speaks to her for a while without sitting, and walks out as she gets up and follows. I have no idea what the interactions were.
My BlackBerry buzzes; it’s my US colleagues heading out for a drink. We meander some, find someplace open (it’s almost midnight), and have a beer. On the way back, some folks are hanging out — twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings. One woman in the group is laughing and starts patting us all on our backs and arms as we pass, saying Tak! Tak! Ya lublyu tibya! and so on. “Yes! Yes! I love you!” It’s awkward, and I assume she’s had too much ecstasy or something, but perhaps there’s something else that I missed.
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