Market time!

Day 11 – September 20 – Today was our 15^th and 16^th visits with Veeka. She is mostly enjoying our time with us. Life can be so confusing for a little one in this situation. Our morning visit went like the most recent visits. We go outside and hunt for walnuts and swing and slide. She had a great morning. We introduced her to bubbles. Poor little girl had never experienced them before. She didn’t really know what to think of them. I think she was almost scared of them. Caleb loved them; and she finally thought that they may be ok. After a few minutes of playing with them, the bottle accidentally got dumped over, and then that was the end of that. Our afternoon visit was kind of strange. We got there right at 4pm and Veeka was gone. Everyone else in her group was there, but she was not. Finally through some really bad sign language on our part, we finally figured out through the caretaker, that she had gone to get her passport picture made and that she would be right back. After an hour, she finally made it back and she was so dressed up. She had on the cutest dress we had ever seen. She looked so good. She changed into her play clothes and ate a snack. (They have been so nice because they always give Caleb whatever kind of snack they are eating.) With only about 30 to 45 minutes left of our visit, we got a chance to go outside.

This is Caleb and Papa playing Rock, Paper, Scissors waiting for Veeka to come back from getting her passport picture made.

During our free time, we were really adventurous and went downtown. (Since we have found everything we need, we really don’t venture far from our little beaten paths.) There is a place downtown with a bunch of stores and we thought we would check it out for no other reason than to buy some clothes for Veeka. It is not that far to downtown, probably an hour walk, but with little Caleb we decided to spring for a taxi. In the car, the drive was about 5 minutes. The place we were going is called Lebed Plaza. (It has the cheapest clothes in all of Ukraine, so we have been told.) We had such an interesting time. We walked around the “Plaza” for a while but couldn’t really find much of what we were looking for. Down one of the streets from the plaza was the start of what looked to be a market of some kind…it was so exciting. It was set up kind of like a flea market. Everybody brings their stuff to sell and sets it up in these little booths. They have it sections like grocery canned good items, bread products, noodles (50# bags of noodles, rice, sugar, etc.), clothes, produce, household goods, and a meat section. In the meat section there were butchers just chopping meat right next to us. It was the best experience to feel a little bit of Ukraine. Caleb was in awe! Monty and I both were in awe! It was like the farmers market on steroids. Not included in the meat section was another area that just contained fish. Little bath tubs filled the aisle with some live fish, some semi-alive fish and dead fish. If they didn’t have a tub for their fish they would just dump their fish out on the concrete. This was probably one of the most authentic Ukrainian moments we have had so far. We did find a lot of clothes for Veeka so we plan to go back sometime next week. We always felt safe while we were there. We probably stuck out like a sore thumb, just gawking and such, so we chose to leave our camera in the bag. Maybe next time we will be brave and get it out to bring home some of our experience. Caleb didn’t do math or reading today, but we all had a great social studies lesson!