These are my host
Varia, my local hairdresser
Ina and
Dacha, the daughter of Ina and one of my Russian-Ukrainian language teachers. Varia and I have visited Ina and Dacha yesterday (they live a few houses from here) and I guess we are friends by now. I love to hear Dacha say my name. She even speaks a little English ('bye bye', 'see you' and then she throws hand kisses). You can tell, she is a woman of the world already.
Just to prove that I am not just lazily hanging around all the time, Varia took this picture from behind her sewing machine. In the back is Vitaly. Below one of my drawings to be printed on a bag. In a few days, we will probably have them done! I could not imagine I would so quickly reach concrete results during my stay here, but my new friends are very enthousiastic and helpful... Spasibo!
But the day was long... so we also headed to Kharkiv, to some so called typical 'SSSR'-appartment. Varia had to see family customers there, to verify if the dress she is working on for their daughter, fits and is to everyone's wishes. We must have been spending over 2 hours measuring, discussing, trying, cutting... But I did not mind at all. After all, I was treated with surprisingly tasty chocolates. And also, for the first time I was using the Kharkiv metro... some amazing architecture was revealed to me.
Finally came the appropriate end to another interesting day in Ukraine... A freshly married couple from the village picked Varia and me up at the station, and they wanted to celebrate all kinds of things with a bottle of champagne and local beer. "To our friend from Holland, who obviously is very talented! And to a good boyfriend for her, because talent of a woman only really blossoms when she has a kind and friendly man beside her!" was one of the many speeches of this Korotich ex-general. His fresh wife liked to recite love poems while we drank. Cheers to this romantic evening...
