you remember last year? The broken heating?

Well, so does Kyiv. Whilst Janis is stuffing her face with London’s finest sushi, my water has been cut off. There is a leak from our flat to the flat below which my landlord has apparently refused for fix for five years. The owner below took out a court order and got the water shut off. I’ve been without water for over 2 days now. Amazingly, this is legal until “all circumstances and details are investigated and fixed in corresponding order” which means at least 2 weeks or more likely until we move out and they can take the flat to bits.

I have two options:

- Find a short term place here
- Move to the US early.

I’m investigating both in parallel. The dogs are a sticking point on both fronts.

They did it! The big white house is now the big red house. Without a roof.

Or rather, wish the DVDs luck. Tomorrow, they go “over the wall” each one with a euro tucked behind its ear.

Mid-life crisis? Me?

Yesterday, I felt like I’d been sent back two years. I had to get a power of attorney for our removers. Just like when we were arriving, I had to burn a day waiting in a hot cramped office for someone to sign an impressive looking but essentially meaningless document.

That was easy though. I am not looking forward to getting all of our stuff out of Ukraine. The removal men arrived today they took one look at our (relatively modest) DVD collection and phoned the mother-ship. I was handed the phone to discuss the problem with Vlad.

“Our customs manager said you can’t have more than 20 CDs”
“CDs or DVDs?”
“Both. Anything. Discs”
“We can take them out if you pay one euro per item. It is not official”

Ukraine has been targeted as one of the world hot-spots for DVD piracy, obviously they want to keep the legal DVDs in the country to keep the ratios up. At least I’ll be back regularly, I can stash them at the office and carry them out in batches.

I’m now convinced that not bringing our stuff into Ukraine was the right idea.

It’s always the same when you do these international moves. It seems ages and ages away and then suddenly you don’t have enough time.

Of course, this time is different. It’s much worse. All of accumulated stuff is in Paris. It has been since we left Vence. Not all of our stuff of course, the car was driven over full and we’ve bought more stuff here. To keep the prices for the move merely astronomical we’re going to ship stuff from Kyiv to Paris and then put all of it together in a container to San Francisco.

Last night we agreed on the quote from the removal company and gave them the go ahead. They did the calculations back from our preferred arrival date (July 1st) and sent me this mail:

Dear Mrs. & Mr. Nolan:
Please confirm that Corstjens can do the pack-out of your household effects
on Monday, May 14 at 10:30 hrs. at your Kiev residence I wish you a nice week-end.
Sincerely,
The Lovely Larysa.

Remember our cleaner? He finally took some advice I’ve been giving him for about 6 months. Leave town.

He was only in Kyiv to get the visa issued for his wife and kids. They closed the Kyiv Visa office sometime in 1985.

He has left Kyiv for dneproderjinsk or some other misspelt small Ukrainian town. They’re going to live in his wifes flat - which she owns so they live rent free. A big different to Kyiv where they were living about $300 above their means every week.

Here they are after I drove them to the station.

The small parcel is the new baby which answers his earlier question. Ask me who packed the car. Don’t ask me how they managed on the train with those bags.

We’ve agreed a date for the move. We plan to land in SF on 1st july. Just in time for Janis’s “anti American independence day parade”.

We received this in a sort of “oh, by the way…”

She and us both. Uhhh, all three.

We got new passports. I say passports, HMG has taken to issuing bird spotters i-Spy books instead of passports. Each page has a picture of a bird on it. I’m not sure if there’s any requirement to match up with the national bird of the country you’re visiting. Very pretty though - much better than the old ones… except for one thing.

The pretty birdy pictures are obviously a come on to tempt people into having a biometric big brother friendly passport. They added another thing to quell the riots in Rhyll and protests in Peterhead. The new i-Spy bird spotter passports are tri-lingual: English, Welsh and some other dialect of Welsh than looks just as dangerous to speak.

I preferred it when we didn’t like the welsh and they burnt our holiday cottages down. Now it seems we all have to speak their language as if words like Cymmrodorion were sensible or even utterable.