Saturday, 22 May 2010 08:30
We’re back in Krasnodar this week. This visa quest took us on our third round trip through Ukraine, which, until now, we’d only seen in the winter. Ukraine + Winter = Pretty Bleak, but Ukraine in the spring is another story altogether.
If someone says “Ukraine” and you think “farmland,” you’re right. (If someone says “Ukraine” and you draw a blank, that’s okay too: they have support groups for that.) This area of the world was once known as the bread basket of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Ukrainian flag, pictured here, was designed to represent the colors of grain fields and sky. 
The farmland in western Europe is broken up into much smaller, quilt-like patches that have their own quaint, pastoral beauty but Ukraine is different: everywhere, vast, unbroken sweeps of farmland stretch to the horizons, interrupted only by an occasional tractor or a pair of peasant farmers hoeing alongside their horse and cart. It’s a little intimidating; it’s astonishingly beautiful. This time of year, the fields are colorful with brown, plowed earth, green wheat, and the brilliant yellow of canola flowers. Canola smells something like lilac, so I highly recommend rolling down your windows as you drive through long stretches of it. Pure aromatherapy.
Many are asking, “What about the police?” You’ll be happy to hear that on the return trip through Ukraine the police never stopped us once. (We did get stopped in Czech Republic, for driving on the highway without a toll sticker, but in an act of grace, they reduced our fine to the minimum and allowed Tim to pay by credit card in the back of the police van. (This wins the prize for "Weirdest Police Encounter Yet.") Other than that, there was only a brief, mildly terrifying moment or two at border control, when the Ukranian side took Tim and me into a small interrogation room (while the kids sat in the car) and went over our documents with a fine-toothed comb… but in the end, they let us go without any fuss.
We arrived home to strawberries, fresh bread, and roses in the kitchen from the neighbors, and had a great reunion with them. There was a small mishap in which the oil-fueled water heater blew up while we were away, so we came home to a household covered in black oil dust, and no hot water for the first three days, but that’s all fixed now.
It’s time to start packing up for the move. Here is what we need to do by the end of June:
- Buy plane tickets
- Ship our books back to America
- Sort everything we want to keep. This needs to fit in about 10 bags that we’ll take on the plane with us.
- Sell everything else
- Get Kopek’s shots and papers in order; buy an approved carrier crate and get a microchip inserted into her neck, because she is about to become an American citizen. She will be going to live with my grandmother in New York. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s just hit the jackpot.
- Sell our car.
- Finish at the orthodontist (this includes breaking the news to the orthodontist Svetlana Kirillevna that Sarah can't finish treatment with her. She'll yell at us.)
- Wind up our various ministries well, including finding people to “hand them off to” who will continue what we started.
- Say a lot of good-byes.
We’ll need your prayers in the weeks ahead. Thanks for holding us up!
