Weekend Guest

My friend Brent from Manitoba was here for the weekend. Brent and his wife Barb went with Tanya and I to Crimea back in June 2007. He was back in Ukraine with the FARM project for two weeks so we snagged him for a couple days. I took the minibus in to Dnipro on Friday morning, went to see my chiropractor there and met up with Brent after the day's meetings.

Brent and I had supper with Tim who had just flown in from Riyadh and SE Asia. He had picked up a cold in Kuala Lumpur and food poisoning in Karachi so was looking forward to a weekend to sleep before meetings on Monday.

I slept over at Roman and Lena's, picked up Brent at the hotel at 8:00 a.m. and by 11:00 we were home in Zhovti Vody. We had a quiet weekend and I put him on the train for Kyiv this morning, all rested up for another week of meetings. Then he and Barb have two weeks holidays in France before flying home on separate airlines. (Royalty?)

Brent was a Farm Management Specialist before his retirement and he and I shared a flat in Kyiv a few years back while teaching a three week course at the National Agrarian University of Ukraine to specialists from all over Ukraine. We even went to see "La Rigatoni" at the Kyiv Opera House. What a great time we had for two operatic novices. We followed the program in English and Ukrainian or we'd have had no idea what was going on.


Our flat had a toaster which worked if you held the lever down. Brent and I still being farm boys at heart, rigged a fix for it. The kettle of water kept the frying pan in place while the bottle of coke on the frying pan handle held the lever down until the toast was done.