Saturday, January 17, 2009

Slow Days in the Village

Not much happening around here these days as you can tell from my blogs. We are suffering from post-holiday budget blues. If it cost a dime to go round the world we couldn't get to the edge of town. Sleep in in the mornings and watch TV till late at night.

It thawed and the streets were all muck. Then it snowed wet heavy snow all last night, covering wires and tree branches and turning the world white again.

We did send some money in to Roman and Lena today for her mom's eye operation on Monday. Money is easiest and cheapest transferred as hard currency in an envelope entrusted to a minibus driver on a regular schedule to Dnipropetrovsk. We count the money; driver counts the money; we give him 10 hrivna, we call the licence number and arrival time to Roman and he picks it up in Dnipro. Works slick. When we were renovating our house and still lived in Dnipropetrovsk we sent several thousands of hrivnas and even USD to Zhovti Vody. No danger of theft. Andrei knows all the drivers.

4 comments:

  1. Having met the man, I certainly would not want to cross Andrei.

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  2. Darn!! And I'd be leery to give my postman a stamped envelope with a check inside!! (I mailed some checks last year and none of them reached their destination)How do you pay your utility bills? And do you have heating bills or do you just heat with wood stoves? I'm SO curious.

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  3. We pay gas, electric and water monthly at the bank. We read our own meters and calculate our own payments based on prices supplied by the utilities. Each utility provides a record book. We fill in the top and bottom of a page, bank takes bottom and stamps top as our receipt. Utilities check our readings every once in a while. We never get a bill per se.

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