Awkward Friday

Audrey and I just had the most amazing Friday ever. Two of our friends, Jennii and Mindy, were soo awesome and amazing and just freaking fantastic to give us the day off. We appreciate you guys mucho.


Our amazing Friday actually started on Thursday night. Technicalities, people. We were walking home from the grocery store when we saw this:

This is the first official flower blossom that we have seen. Perfect. Of course then we turned the corner and saw a whole tree full of blossoms, BUT THIS WAS THE FIRST.

We went home, had our Ramen for dinner, and tucked ourselves into bed waiting for Friday morning.

Early Friday morning (11am) we left our apartment and greeted the amazing 65 degree weather. We took the subway to downtown Kiev where we said hi to our future home. I didn't take a picture this time, I'm sure you remember what it looks like. We walked over to St Sophia's where we made a sharp right turn and walked down a cute little street. And we came upon this:

Maidan Nezalezhnosti is the central square of Kiev and looked over by the Liberty Statue. It was so nice and peaceful that we found a nice place to sit and have a picnic. Before leaving the apartment, we packed some fresh bread, tomatoes, grapes, bananas, mozzerella, and pesto.

Awkward moment #1: Do Ukrainians have picnics? Oh well.

Awkward moment #2: While we were sitting here, a girl came up and tried to interview us about something that was happening. She asked her question and hit record on her tape recorder.."I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're saying to me.." Then she apologized and walked away. That'll be fun to listen to.

Hello, green grass. I've missed you.

This will be amazing when the flowers bloom around it. I'm excited just thinking about it.

Fancy meeting you here, Shrek.

Then Audrey took a picture of a guy in a cat costume:

You can barely even see him in the picture, but this caused awkward moment numbers 3 and 4.

Awkward moment #3: Being harassed by a cat asking if you took a picture of him.

Awkward moment #4: Lying to the cat. "No."

"Dude, I just lied to a cat.."

So we kept walking down the street. Making random turns whenever one popped up.

We made a right turn at the end of this street because there was a guard blocking the gate to actually walk in front of this building (Awkward moment #5: Spazzing out on the corner because we can't figure out if we're allowed to cross.).

That right turn was good because we ended up finding a cute park to walk around in for a while.

At one point while walking around in here, we spotted a bathroom. It was a weird bathroom, you had to go down steps into a basement room. I decided not to visit it.. Audrey had to though. I sat down on the bench outside and dug out a pack of tissues for Audrey (you never know if they have toilet paper or not, this one didn't) and as soon as Audrey turned to go down the stairs and I looked up, I was surrounded by at least 20 policemen. I'm not even kidding you. They ALL had to be 20-25 years old. I have no idea where they came from, but they all stood RIGHT in front of me and started taking a smoke break. I had my sunglasses on still so they had no idea where I was looking, but I'm pretty sure my eyes were as big as saucers, just shocked.

Have you ever had a moment when it just wasn't an appropriate time to break out in laughter? This was one of them. I had to physically restrain my mouth from moving. Whenever one would look in my direction, I would lose my cool just a little bit. "Just look at the ground.. volcanoes.. hurricanes.. omg." Audrey had to have been in the bathroom for like a million hours and by the time she came out and I saw her face, I was still sitting on the bench with my fingers literally holding my lips together. I lost it. We walked away pretty fast while I was laughing out loud hysterically. They just stared. Awkward moment #6? YES. Best awkward moment of the day? YES.

We made our way back through the downtown area and we found ourselves sitting in our usual cafe. This place is always awkward. I don't even know how to explain it, but we keep going back because the food and coffee is excellent. The waiter came over and asked if we wanted anything, and I looked at Audrey so she could order. I have no idea what happened, but she ordered half in Russian and half in English and the waiter dude was just as frazzled as us by the end of the conversation. Awkward moment #7.

By the time he retured with our drinks and cake, our giggle fit was over and we approached the next awkward moment with straight faces. We originally ordered two cappuccinos and two pieces of cappuccino cheesecake, but we were given two cappuccinos, one cheesecake, and one diet coke. Ugh. How do you tell the waiter, who is adamant about speaking to you in English, while you're speaking to him in Russian, that you didn't order that? Very awkwardly, of course. #8.

This was on the menu. The Russian says "Potato", the English says "Chocolate Pancake". What about this is

1) a potato

2) a pancake

We assume it's a chocolate pancake shaped like a potato. Maybe we'll try it next time?

We played MASH for about an hour on napkins. We're both pretty excited about our napkin-decided futures. I ended up with a house in Prague, 5 kids, a Ukrainian husband, and a green kitchen. Audrey will have a mansion in Ukraine, 1 kid, an American husband, and a white kitchen.

On our way home, we stopped by the bookstore close to our house and decided to buy a movie. We've been told that it's a waste of money to buy DVDs here because they won't work because of the country code. We decided to try our luck and bought one.

Turns out we can get them to work on our laptops, but next time we should make sure there's an English option on the back of the DVD case before we buy it.

Anyway, we had an amazing begining to our four day weekend, even including our movie blunder. We have tickets to the Romeo and Juliet ballet tonight, so we're pretty sure it's going to be a good day.

Happy Easter, everyone :)