Restaurant Woes

We have a daily eating routine....breakfast in our hotel room, lunch in the American's hotel room and then we go out for supper. We have three restaurants to choose from. Each has it's pros and cons. Usually we pick based on location, but when we get tired of that restaurant, we have to go somewhere else. You have to understand, it is at least a 15 minute walk to the closest restaurant and temperatures here right now are close to 40 degrees celcius. Lately we've been running into some problems at our restaurants. Sometimes...they don't serve food. No rhyme or reason..we just get there and they tell us "no food." That's quite disappointing after walking 15 minutes in the blazing sun and find out you have to walk 15 more minutes to get a meal.

Today we thought we would be smart and have our driver drop us off at the furthest restaurant from our hotel after our orphanage visit. Then we would only have the half hour walk back. After our driver dropped us off and left, we went inside only to find out the bad news...."no food." What the heck? It's supper time and we've come here for supper many times!!!! Talk about utter frustration. So we do a 15 minute treck to the next restaurant. We pull out our camera to show the pictures of what we would like to eat. Terry points to chicken....."No...only pig kabobs." Ugh! So we were all stuck eating pork kabobs or go hungry. We didn't want to risk walking to the next restaurant to find out they're not serving food either. I personally liked the pork kabobs. It was a refreshing change from the chicken dipped in egg that I've eaten for the past seven days straight. Terry, however, would have preferred chicken for the eighth time! We can't wait to eat a big juicy steak when we get home!!! (hint, hint dad!) LOL (LOL means laugh out loud, in case you're wondering, dad)

Yesterday we bought every flavor of chips from the supermarket. Unfortunately, they do not have crab flavor. Last night's first sample was bacon flavor. The picture on the front of the bag is of raw bacon...not very appealing. I gave it two thumbs down, Terry gave it one thumb up. He polished them off.

Funny thing about the supermarkets here. The Canadians and Americans are cleaning them out. Every time we find something we like, the next time we go to buy it, there's none left. It's very strange. And the stores here only seem to get stock every one or two weeks, so we're basically hooped. One store where I bought some cereal I liked has been out all week. I found it at another supermarket today. They had a whole two boxes....so I cleaned them out. Even when we order drinks at a restaurant, we usually can't all get the same thing. They will only have like two sprites and three cokes. Luckily we can usually work it out between the five of us who gets Sprite and who gets Coke. Oh ya, and that's the only two flavors of pop they seem to have in Ukraine...at least in this town.

Today we bought three huge watermelons to take to the orphanage. There was a lady selling them on the side of the road. She was totally amused by us english speaking people. The watermelons weren't that great. It's been awhile since I've had some with seeds in it. The kids at the orphanage loved it, though. Especially Emma. She polished off about six huge pieces. And she was soaked from nose to bellybutton in watermelon juice!

Tomorrow will be our last visit to the orphanage. Terry and I stopped by a little store today to find some treats we could pass out to all the kids. This store had a pile of Kinder eggs, so we thought it would be a good treat becasue they each come with a little toy. We asked the lady behind the counter how much (they always punch the amount on a calculator and show it to us so we can understand) They were five and a half hryvna each...which is quite a bit because we wanted thirty of them. Terry punched in the calculator the number thirty to show the lady how many we wanted. Her eyes bulged out of her head as she punched in thirty times five fifty and it came to one hundred and sixty five hryvna (about thirty bucks Canadian) Terry nodded his head "yes" so two ladies behind the counter started packing them all up. They were just talking and laughing very hard. They were probably wondering why two adults needed thirty Kinder eggs! People here laugh at us wherever we go.