Building codes and plumbing

I've been trying to figure out a coherent and complete-ish train of thought about this, as I think it's interesting,

When we arrived at our Moscow apartment, the bathrooms both stunk.  Nothing terrible, just a faint stink of sewage and mold.  The only time I have smelled an equivalent bathroom smell in the US was a couple times when I've lived in houses with a bothroom undergoing remodel.  They have outside-ventilated fans running 24/7 in the bathrooms, which is good, but though at first I was dismayed about the poor plumbing there though confident that I could fix it, I've come to realize that plumbing is an unsolved problem in this part of the world.  HSBC in downtown Moscow, the nice clubs in downtown Moscow, the bathroom in this newly-built nice beachfront hotel in Ukraine...  All have the same stink of mold and sewage.

Winners and Losers

I just walked the village looking for a few things.  A decent cup of coffee, toothpaste, and Tylenol.  We have walked an insane amount the few days we've been here (the day we arrived we, after exploring the whole town of Yvpratoria, took a taxi over to this town of Shtormovoe and proceeded to walk the 3 mile trip up the beach to Kazantip 3.5 times).  Yesterday we cut it down to only about 3 miles of beach walking, but did plenty of other exploring.  Traveling is tough.

So...  I walked the streets of the entire town and found one coffee machine.  Score.  I found several of the little coffee vending machines that dispense (bad) instant coffee in various forms, but at the little Italian cafe (Cafe Leto), they had an honest-to-god Gaggia machine.  However, they were not open, I think.  I have not learned such key phrases as, "Are you open?" since I normally have my own personal translator, but I need to work on that.  I also don't really know, "Do you have?"  Need to work on that.  So, I decided to try my rusty Russian on a girl at a vegetable stand at the rynochik and got a melon.  I walked up and said, "Dobre ootra." (good morning) and she started blushing.  Apparently it's pretty rusty.  I then asked how much the melon I wanted was (a honeydew-type melon whose exact equivalent I haven't seen in the states) and she told me 4-something (that I understood).  I asked her to give me one, she asked me big or small, I said, good, and she picked one out and weighed it.  All the produce transactions here are done with the scales like they have at delis in the US where they put in the price/kilo and it just gives them the number and they all have a little calculator to keep the total as you get more things.  Those nice scales seem pretty sophisticated - they all of course have cell phones.  Running water, on the other hand, is hit-or-miss.  Anyway, got the melon, it wound up being 4.50 Ukrainian money units/kilogram, so that's about $0.25/lb.  Not bad.

Next, I found an apteka (pharmacy), which in this case was a kiosk in a building hallway, which was a little strange, but oh well.  The kiosks all helpfully have all their product stacked on top of each other in the window.  I browsed around and quickly found Colgate.  Win for their global marketing team.  Ok, noted, I then started looking for Tylenol.  I thought that for sure I'd be able to spot it just by the distinctive red package, but none of the red packaging looked like it might be tylenol.  There's a pretty funny mix of English/Russian on the boxes.  They would have random words like "anti-flu" in English, and then a lot of the words are basically their English equivalents but written in the Cyrillic alphabet.  I couldn't find the Tylenol and all the other customers left so it was just me standing there awkwardly.  The woman rudely said something I couldn't make out, I stumbled through, "Good morning, I want colgate."  She looked baffled, and I pointed.  It says on every side of the box "Colgate", there is no cyrillic equivalent, so I have no idea what it is in her head.  We got that communicated and she was annoyed.  I then asked about Tylenol, and she seemed baffled.  I tried pronouncing it a few different ways but to no avail.  Then tried "ibuprofen", and "aspirin".  She typed something in her computer and then said something that sounded something like "aspirin" but like she'd swallowed a frog shortly before uttering it.  Maybe that was the Ukrainian word for aspirin.  I said sure, and paid up.

Phew.  So in a little Ukrainian town on the Black Sea, coffee is failing to effectively provide a drinkable product.  Colgate is succeeding, Tylenol has failed.

Make a note of that, global marketers everywhere.

Don't speak

We'd just gotten off the train after our 25 hour train ride (4th class) from Moscow to Yvpratoria, Ukraine - a little beach city from which we would head over in a taxi to a little village to stay in because it's cheaper/cleaner/less crowded.  We were walking down the street and saw a little stand with probably 30 different little barrels of wine.  Ukraine prides itself on its wine, and I must say, it's really good.  So we try a couple different styles, and decide on a glass to get.  We say thank you, "spaciba" in Russian, then ask the young kid, about our age or a few years younger, "Oh wait, how do you say thank you in Ukrainian?"  Ukraine was of course part of the USSR, and so everyone speaks Russian, and I think everything had to be officially in Russian, but some Ukrainians speak Ukrainian between each other and many of the signs are in Ukrainian - the instructions we got when buying a SIM card for our cell phone was in Ukrainian, so indecipherable to Ira (and of course me).  I think the language "battle" is interesting as these people decide on an identity to adopt - there are a lot more signs in English around here than I saw in Russia.

So he tells us how to say thank you in Ukrainian, and we say to him, "(whatever that word was)."  His reply, good-naturedly, "Don't speak that dirty language to me, I'm not Ukrainian."

Weird.

Update - on talking to some locals of Crimea (our 24-year old hotel managers), we were told that basically, Ukrainian people speak to each other in Ukrainian only if they are from tiny villages.  Anyone who is from or wants to appear to be from a city of any decent size (like 10,000 people plus) speaks Russian amongst themselves.

Test post.

It is WAY too hot here in Moscow.  Like, whoa.

This is the friendly fruit lady.  I buy a lot of potatoes from her...