No, I'm not dead, just buried. Ukraine decided to celebrate the arrival of spring with a huge snow storm that's been going on for about three days. It let off today, leaving about 18 inches in its wake.
It coincided nicely with a holiday though (another one), as today is Woman's Day, when we show our appreciation for women, in case we had forgotten to do it on any other day of the year.
I have little to do at the moment, and have just been damn lazy the past four days. When I'm busy, it seems like my life runs like clockwork. When I don't have a lot to do, I can't even manage to do it, I have so little motivation. So I've pretty much been lounging for the past four days.
The lounging kicked off nicely on Friday night, though, just before the snow started. Carrie, Steve, Amy, Terese (a volunteer at a nearby town), Diana and I had a "Sex and the City" marathon over at Steve's house.
I had picked up the first three disks of season 6 at Patrivka, the black market in Kyiv. For some places, the black market is more of an abstract concept. Not so in Kyiv. You catch the metro to the Patrivka stop and there you will find hundreds of booths and tables with every bootleg CD, DVD, video, computer program and book you can imagine. As soon as a movie hits the theatres in America, there is a bootleg DVD of it in Patrivka. And, thanks to the magic of digital technology, you can switch between the English or the Russian tracks. So, for the cost of 75 hrivna ($14), I picked up the first 15 episodes of "Cekc V Bolshoi Gorad, Seeson Sheest". And that's a little steep because they're so new.
So we all went to Steve's, I cooked dinner (fried chicken, cheese and garlic mashed potatoes, and corn) and we didn't stop watching them until 4:00 AM. Diana went home after the first disc, as she had to get up the next morning. As I walked her to the bus stop, she commented: "Ukrainian women are more reserved; we would never talk about those things in front of guys."
She was referring to the fact that the volunteer ladies had been talking--in slightly graphic terms--about sex. This talk had been increaseing in direct relation to alcohol and episode consumption. By the time Diana had left, they were plotting to go to a club and get some men with which to enact this talk. I don't know why men try to put on porn to get a woman in the mood. Just put on Sex and the City, shut up and let it happen.
As is, I did end up sleeping with two women that, but it was less pleasant than that sounds. With five of us crashing at Steve's, I was sardined between Carrie and Amy on the fold out couch. Theoretically, this should be pleasant. In reality, I was either choking on Carrie's hair in one direction, dealing with a combination of alcohol and morning breath from Amy on the other. Small prices to pay, I suppose, if I had been getting some, but I wasn't.
In any case, their plot to pick up men at a club is what had me walking to one the next evening through a blizzard, only to find that only Carrie and Steve made it due to the snow. I would have thought the club would be empty, but it turns out that during a blizzard, every Ukranian goes out. The first club we went to was so packed they were no longer admitting people, and the next was pushing capacity as well.
Carrie didn't pick up a guy, but there was certainly a lot of eye candy for me and Steve. Now we just had to figure out how to get them home and have them watch "Sex and the City".