Home Sweet Home

I'm on my second week here in Ukraine, and it's full time I take you all on a few tours! Of course, all of these start with a home-base...that is, uh, my home! I, like most people here, live in one of the ubiquitous concrete-block apartment buildings that dominate the landscape. My little concrete housing area consists of about 5 of these behemoths, laundry lines strung among the trees, chatting babushkas out on the steps, lots of cats, a few metal playgrounds, and a lot of worn, dirt paths through it all. It's as homey as these kind of places can get!

I really wanted to take a lot of photos of the atmosphere of it all, but being the new girl in town (and a foreigner at that) in a former Communist country, you just can't go around taking photos of everything without people becoming a little bit suspicious of you. Call it my own paranoia, but when it comes to these kind of things, I'm not really looking to make it on anyone's spy list (and I've heard some stories)!

Anyway, here is my place, the white oasis on the desert of concrete:

And our front benches for chatting and watching your drying laundry to make sure no one scoots off with your skivvies:

After getting through my two (yes, TWO) front doors and three deadbolts, you are then whisked into a newly remodeled apartment for one. The doors on the left are for the kitchen, toilet, and shower room:

My quaint living room which is already rocking the "lived-in" look:

Warning: the following photos of my bedroom will either make you viciously blink to try and adjust to the brightness (awesomeness?), AND/OR make you jealous of my "mustard-meets-safari" theme. In any case, it does the job, and I'm sure I'll grow quite attached to it all:

Carrying on the mustard theme (sandwiches, anyone?), we finish with the kitchen:

Complete with my Euro-sized fridge and washing machine (which, as I have discovered, can wash a load of about 12 pairs of underwear, OR one pair of pants, OR 4 shirts. Nothing more!):

And that's my Ukrainian-Soviet-Euro crib!