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.
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