tripp's ukrainian information superhighway journal

2006-07-23T13:24:00.000+03:00

i haven't put anything on here for a while. since zoe has arrived most of our life is dedicated to her. a couple of days before she was born though, lyala and i went to the kyiv morye (kiev sea). this is actually a reseviour for the a power station, like we call them lakes, they call them seas. i was looking on the map one day and i saw that the road by our apartment goes up to this large body of

2006-06-27T11:34:00.000+03:00

Zoe Jacklynn Stowe, June 25th 2006, year of the dog, zodiac cancer. Day 2:From now on I will post baby pictures to http://zoejacklynn.blogspot.com. This blog will still be used to pics and stories of what lyala, zoe, and i (i am outnumbered now) are doing. So check both!

2006-06-12T14:08:00.000+03:00

the spring has been a wet and cold one. this is a big difference from what i am used to a slightly wet and hot one. we get rain about everyday and the temp has been in the upper 60s. some days we get weather in the uppers 70s, not many, so we have to take advantage of it. we went to a lake nearby this weekend, which btw i learned that kiev has more swimmable lakes than any city in Europe. where

2006-05-22T14:31:00.000+03:00

After one year of being here we finally made it to russia. not so surprising because of how much of a big deal it is. the visa cost about $100, you have to have a letter of invite $30 (from a tourist company), and you have to register once you get there, meaning you have to stay in a hotel somewhere, sometime so they can register you. all in all though, it was worth it. st. petersburg is

2006-04-25T13:44:00.000+03:00

hello everyone, spring is finally here.the weather is warming up a good bit, and the allergies aren't too bad so it is good. we are planning a final trip to russia. we are going to spend some time in moscow and st. petersburg. i will definitely have a good bit of photos from that, so check back in a couple of weeks.people have been

2006-03-30T13:03:00.000+03:00

oh man, i don't know much else to say. i think that we went to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and we have been to paris. budapest, it is simply amazing, but i am getting too ahead of myself. lets start from the beginning,our trip started out good, save lyala's boots falling apart as soon as we left the apartment. it turned out to be no problem at all though, who needs tread

2006-03-15T21:51:00.000+02:00

i got my wish and it froze up again. so we went on a walk across water. Unfortunately the river was still thawed, but there are some large ponds around it that were frozen. people were out there ice fishing. from what i have heard from a canadian friend of mine, this is more about catching a buzz then a fish, but who knows?meeshka seems to enjoy the open space too, i think that he would make a

2006-02-23T15:06:00.000+02:00

its still warm here. warm as in 1 degree C. but now its really messy, reminds me of winters in the carolinas (well not from what i heard this year), that i do not miss at all. cold and rainy is a lot more of a downer than colder and snowy. the only real difference in the temperatures is one layer of clothes. all the snow is about melted, but i dont think it is over yet. temps are suppose to start

2006-02-20T15:56:00.000+02:00

this weekend we went to the river for plans to cross it and we got this. lyala stepped on the river and it all broke apart!so we are in a little thaw right now. it has been in the positive temps celsius for the past couple of days and is suppose to continue for a week. after that it may freeze again, and i might get my chance to cross the river.here is another kinda cool pic of the ice.on other

2006-02-18T18:26:00.000+02:00

the writing of the blog has been stalled for the winter months a little. mostly for lack of material, but i figured i owed it to the readers, if there are any left after the long break, to write something and put up some pics.here the snow has been on the ground ever since ashley left pretty much. today was our first day above freezing since that time too. it has been the coldest winter they have

2006-01-20T14:28:00.000+02:00

happy really belated holidays everyone! ours were so great that i was not able to post here at all, as you can tell. for yalls christmas, i went to sevestopol, a town in the crimea on the black sea. i visited with some guys from the peace corp that i met here on a train(i had a pic of them on a previous blog). i didn't get many pics though. right after that my sister ashley, spas, and his friend

2005-12-19T16:24:00.000+02:00

I would like to start out this post by telling everyone that lyala got her first acceptance letter from duke university. we will know from yale in mid january and from chicago in march. congrats to lyala on being accepted to duke's mba program, one of the top programs in the world!we had a little adventure the lately. the story is that i cannot stay in ukraine for more than six months at a time.

2005-12-03T18:57:00.000+02:00

i posted when it was fall so it only seems normal to post when it is winter. it is now winter here! we went downtown last night and maydan(the central square) and when we can out of the subway it had started snowing(to bad i didnt have my camera then) and didnt stop until this afternoon. this is a view from behind our new apartment.for those of you that did not know, he had to move quickly, so we

2005-11-24T23:35:00.000+02:00

i know, it took forever but . . .the backpacking trip (cont.)where did we leave off, oh yes, lunch. so we had lunch consisting of fruits and sala (fatback). after lunch we started to head up to ukraine’s tallest ridge. on the south part of the ridge is a mountain called black mountain, ukraine's third tallest mountain at 6000ft. it has a lot of mythology around it, like one of the gutsul gods

2005-11-15T20:29:00.000+02:00

sorry everyone that i have not finished the story of our backpacking trip. i will as soon as we get the photos converted. we have been really busy lately. well here's the story, our landlord all of a sudden decided that she had to move to kiev. since there are no real laws here on contracts and if there are, they are not really enforced, we had to move out. she gave us about a weeks notice. so we

2005-10-26T21:45:00.000+03:00

we are back from the carpathians and it was awesome! lyala and i (the other two went back after the first day, "they had something come up") hiked across ukraine's tallest ridge. we actually ended up doing 4 days of hiking and three nights camping. the first day we left from the village where we stayed to a 'base camp'. it was really a farming community that you could rent a place to stay. we

2005-10-07T18:18:00.000+03:00

today we got lyala's applications sent off to yale and duke! she has been working on them, including the 3 essays she had to write for each, for over a month now. this weekend we are going backpacking for three days in the carpathian mountains. i am leading a trip of three newbies. should be fun, i hope they can hack it. we might hike up a 2 kilometer high mountain if the weather is good! i have

2005-09-24T14:30:00.000+03:00

There is a folk museum in on the outskirts of kiev. this place is very interesting, what they did is they found old village houses as old as 500 years old, disassembled them and then moved them to this outdoor museum. they have set up villages from different regions of ukraine. i would break ukraine into three major regions: the west, influenced by lithuania/hungary/poland; the south, influenced

2005-09-24T14:21:00.000+03:00

lyala in front of the oldest house in the museum, from the 1500s, when there were only teepees in the US

2005-09-24T14:18:00.000+03:00

a view from on top of a hill at the museum

2005-09-24T14:15:00.000+03:00

Shevchenko' actual house, the famous ukrainian poet that i mentioned in previous logs(see statue below).

2005-09-11T17:20:00.000+03:00

life here recently has been a little different. i had to have an abscess surgically removed from my gum the other day. some of you might remember that when i first got here i had a procedure for it, but that procedure was not 100% effective and i was unlucky. i got to experience the state 's medical facilities which i was pretty impressed with. the doctors are to the point and very efficient. so

2005-08-29T17:04:00.000+03:00

lately lyala has been working on her essays for school, so i have been trying to get out of the house and explore around kiev by myself. so i went to some of the touristy parts of kiev that i have already already been but i have not taken pics of. so here are some more pictures for yall. we will start at andriyivskyy, a cobblestone street that is the center of kiev's tourism. there are a lot of

2005-08-23T23:39:00.000+03:00

Hurricane Leonard has left the coast of the Dniper. There were not many bars left untouched in Kiev by this force. There were at least three hit a night. The winds started last Wednesday and ended this Friday. Hydropark, our huge island park, hit and so was Chernigiv, Lyala’s home town. But all in all, the city is in good shape and everyone recuperated nicely after a couple of days.All is good,

2005-08-11T15:02:00.000+03:00

Good News everyone: NO VISA ARE REQUIRED FOR USA, EU, and CANADIAN CITIZENS for less than a 90 stay here in ukraine now. that means that yall that are planning to come and visit only need a valid passport now. this cuts out a lot of hassle and an extra $100 for you. more incentive to come and visit! since i am doing a post i might as well find a picture to post. lets see... here i am trying my

2005-08-08T20:27:00.000+03:00

Taras Shevchenko, the most famous ukrainian poet/artist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko

2005-08-08T20:14:00.000+03:00

my newly refurbished grill

2005-08-08T20:09:00.000+03:00

my optional strawhole installed on my new grill.

2005-08-08T20:07:00.000+03:00

lyala trying to cool down next to the fountain

2005-08-08T20:06:00.000+03:00

even the crow thinks it hot! he was just walking around with his mouth open like this.

2005-08-08T20:05:00.000+03:00

meeshka and lyala swimming

2005-08-08T20:03:00.000+03:00

meeshka swimming out into the river with lyala

2005-08-08T19:48:00.000+03:00

man its been hot here. i also heard that in the N & SC it has been hot too. i had to hear all yall complain about it, so i figured that i would return the favor. anyways, my soccer team got eliminated from the european cup :( But i did meet a couple of new people. one of them being a trombonist photographer, so we have a lot of talk about, if we could speak the same language, ha! na we get along

2005-07-23T21:48:00.000+03:00

our friend paula from the states, lyala and a great medieval warrior!

2005-07-23T21:43:00.000+03:00

our little cousin paula

2005-07-23T21:41:00.000+03:00

meeshka hanging out at the river

2005-07-23T21:39:00.000+03:00

the "weeds"

2005-07-23T21:37:00.000+03:00

lyala playing in the "weeds"

2005-07-23T21:10:00.000+03:00

i haven't been doing much since my last post. i have been playing chess online with some of yall and i finally started to look for a job. a couple of my friends gave me some good leads but i have not heard anything yet. then again it has only been a couple of days. today we went to the hydropark here in kiev. the hydropark is a large park like central park in the NYC, except it is on an island in

2005-07-16T18:39:00.000+03:00

The bureaucracy is crazy here! Here is the story of getting our car registered. First, we had to travel to Chernigiv because that is where lyala is registered. So we started on Saturday afternoon. Yep, the ‘dmv’ is open on Saturday and closed on Sunday and Monday. This a good thing. The first step is to get an inspection to make sure the cars current paper work matches the vin numbers. There are

2005-07-06T18:34:00.000+03:00

the "red bomb"

2005-07-06T18:33:00.000+03:00

I guess last but not least, we bought a car this week. It is a Russian made car called a VAS or Lada. It is a 1.5l, 5 speed, carbureted sled! We don’t need it to get around Kyiv, but if we want to take Meeshka anywhere we need it and also to travel to Lyala’s mom’s house about 110k away. So I guess we should say that we bought Meeshka a car. All the imports are sooo expensive here. There is about

2005-07-06T18:31:00.000+03:00

For the 4th of July, on July 2nd, they actually had a US independence day celebration at a rugby stadium put on by the American chamber of commerce for charity. We went to that and I had some really good BBQ, in Ukraine! It was hickory smoked beef filets with a really good hickory sauce. I won a state naming contest and won a rip off of twister called tveester, again no copyright laws here. It

2005-07-06T14:07:00.000+03:00

meeshka, lyala and i playing chess in our park

2005-07-06T14:03:00.000+03:00

lyala, the communist guard, guards a gate on krishatik

2005-07-06T13:57:00.000+03:00

jazz concert at the summer theater in the park in front of the presidential house

2005-07-06T13:54:00.000+03:00

presidential house

2005-07-06T13:53:00.000+03:00

Ukrainian parliament building

2005-07-06T13:48:00.000+03:00

What do we do when we are not traveling you ask? Well let me tell you. We usually go and explore Kiev. Remember that this is a huge city and if we explored it everyday for the rest of our life we would still not know all of it. Needless to say, there is a lot to explore. We try to find English speaking movies at the theater, which hasn’t happen yet. All the movies all over dubbed in Russian. That

2005-06-24T21:07:00.000+03:00

and that is about it for our bulgarian trip. we hopped on the train and headed back to kiev. on the way back we met cool three americans from the peace corp. and hung out with them. they gave me some pics of bosnia that are really cool. but those are not for my website. so what do you think? well until next time ....

2005-06-24T21:06:00.000+03:00

sunset over the dunes in nesebur

2005-06-24T21:05:00.000+03:00

old nesebur island

2005-06-24T21:04:00.000+03:00

albatrosses, i could never get a good perspective of them to show all how big they are. the wingspan is about 5 feet.

2005-06-24T20:50:00.000+03:00

taking a load off from the streets of sofia

2005-06-24T20:48:00.000+03:00

1528 "black mosque" now the "church of the seven saints" that created cyrillic

2005-06-24T20:44:00.000+03:00

sk8 board ramp in front of a russian monument in sofia

2005-06-24T20:43:00.000+03:00

our next destination was the black sea. we made a short stop in sofia for a night and then headed to borgas and nesebur on the coast.

2005-06-24T20:29:00.000+03:00

melnik's surrounding "sand pyramids"

2005-06-24T20:28:00.000+03:00

melnik from above

2005-06-24T20:27:00.000+03:00

is there anymore wine left lyala or did we drink it all?

2005-06-24T20:24:00.000+03:00

medieval church ruins

2005-06-24T20:22:00.000+03:00

melnik streets and wineries

2005-06-24T20:21:00.000+03:00

lyala contemplating the taste of the wine

2005-06-24T20:20:00.000+03:00

wine tasting

2005-06-24T20:19:00.000+03:00

the bus trip to melnik

2005-06-24T20:17:00.000+03:00

later the next week, we went to melnik, the small medieval wine town that i described earlier. we stayed there for couple of days and did some wine tasting. the wine is so famous there that winston churchill had his favorite wine shipped from melnik, even during the war.

2005-06-24T20:05:00.000+03:00

the road home from the monasterythe traffic was slow that day

2005-06-24T20:03:00.000+03:00

i made it! the legend says that if you are too much of a sinner a rock will fall on you.

2005-06-24T20:00:00.000+03:00

hiking mina style!

2005-06-24T19:58:00.000+03:00

14th century bell tower

2005-06-24T19:56:00.000+03:00

monk's quarters (built by m.c. esher ;))

2005-06-24T19:55:00.000+03:00

the rila monastery

2005-06-24T19:54:00.000+03:00

road to the monastery

2005-06-24T19:51:00.000+03:00

after a couple of days, mina’s dad let us borrow the car and we went to bulgaria’s most famous monastery, rila monastery. this monastery of built by holy ivan in the 10th century. it sheltered bulgaria culture during 500 years of rule by the turkish and the byzantines. the original monastery was destroyed and the current one was rebuilt between 1834 and 1837. we also hiked about an hour and a

2005-06-24T19:38:00.001+03:00

coffee shop scene

2005-06-24T19:38:00.000+03:00

spas

2005-06-24T19:37:00.000+03:00

another view from the balcony

2005-06-24T19:36:00.000+03:00

view from mina's balcony

2005-06-24T19:34:00.000+03:00

remnants of turkish rule over a 100 years ago

2005-06-24T19:30:00.000+03:00

we arrive in bulgaria about 6am a couple of days later and we take a bus to the town where mina and spas live, blagoevgrad. we stayed with mina and her parents in their upstairs guest apartment. blagoevgrad is a nice town that i described earlier in this log. they supposedly have 40,000 chairs for coffee shops/cafes in town. the population is around 100,000 so half the town at one time could sit

2005-06-24T19:19:00.000+03:00

romainian country side church

2005-06-24T19:18:00.000+03:00

romainian country side

2005-06-24T19:11:00.000+03:00

well hello everyone, we are finally back from our three-week trip to bulgaria. thanks to spas and mina, we were able to visit and see their beautiful country. so thank you again spas and mina for giving lyala and i this opportunity. i guess i will start from the beginning. we boarded our train in kiev about noon to leave for bulgaria. in total i

2005-06-11T17:48:00.000+03:00

well hello from bulgaria everyone. i cannot upload any pics because i have no way of getting them from my computer through the internet cafe. i will try to find a wireless internet cafe in sofia. right now i am in blagoevgrad, spas and mina's hometown. it is beautiful, i guess the closest comparison that i can make is asheville, in europe, plus about 1 million more coffee shops. next week i am

2005-05-30T14:41:00.000+03:00

what is better? chrome or ... fur.

2005-05-30T14:40:00.000+03:00

on krishatik, some of the street entertainers are full bands like this metal band. btw the metal is good here.

2005-05-30T14:38:00.000+03:00

my maserati does 185.

2005-05-30T14:37:00.000+03:00

corner kick

2005-05-30T14:36:00.000+03:00

soccer action

2005-05-30T14:34:00.000+03:00

inside olympic national stadium

2005-05-30T14:31:00.000+03:00

fire! no really what happen is someone threw a flare on the running track around the field, then started to get out of control, so the cops smoked them out.

2005-05-30T14:29:00.000+03:00

what do you get when you mix a bunch on shirtless guys and riot police?

2005-05-30T14:26:00.000+03:00

shekhar fans

2005-05-30T14:24:00.000+03:00

gena, ula, lyala, sasha, and some of the crowd coming in to the game

2005-05-30T14:23:00.000+03:00

it says republic stadium. the stadium holds 99,000 people, the third largest in europe. i was built for the 1980 moscow olympics.

2005-05-30T14:02:00.000+03:00

since i last talk to you i pretty much have just been settling in. nothing really exciting has happened that i can remember. wake up, get on the internet, study russian, go downtown(there is always something to-do, maybe just not picture worthy). but this weekend was my birthday weekend and it was also kiev day. kiev is a little over 1500 years old. it is the oldest slavic city and one of the

2005-05-19T22:41:00.000+03:00

i really enjoyed yalls comments. please continue to comment so i do feel like i am talking to myself.

2005-05-19T22:38:00.000+03:00

the owl attacks!!!!!

2005-05-19T22:37:00.000+03:00

sasha

2005-05-19T22:36:00.000+03:00

view of our building over the dniper river. see those two identical buildings with the crane over them? that's our next door neighbors that wake us up every morning.