Shopping, and looking for restaurants in what has become a city of seniors

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Yesterday I took Zoriana shopping for the second day in a row. Thursday morning Eddie had had class and grandma was home to watch Marianna.

Without Marianna riding on my shoulders, we were able to stay out for four hours and cover a lot of ground. We rode the regional railway to Pochaina on the right bank and then took the subway down to Poshtova Plosha station in Podil. 

My first objective was to find restaurants that are open, where the few remaining members of our ArtTalkers Toastmasters club might meet for lunch. We saw only about four on our path along Sagaidachnogo Street, up past the Kontraktova Plosha station and up Verkhniy Val Street to the Podil market. Most promising were the Odessa, right on top of the Metro at Verkhniy Val 30, and the Italian restaurant at Verkhniy Val 22. The town is pretty dead.

Turns out that our regular meeting place, the Kuzya Rebra in Bessarabska, is open.  A handful of us will be there today.

The large Podil market was also dead. Only about a quarter of the stalls were open. Judging from the foot traffic on the street and the looks of the market, their clientele is probably still overseas. I got the same impression from the public transit. The Metro trains are running only every 20 minutes. The clocks that display how long it has been since the last train are only designed to go up to 10 minutes. They are blank half the time.  At most stops only one of the entrances is open.

The trolley cars are also running on reduced schedules. From those I saw, I would guess that they too are going only about every 20 minutes. Our neighborhood usually has three buses per hour. We now have only one.

The once-an-hour bus that Zoriana and I rode was fairly full, but a headcount revealed that of the 20 or so passengers there were only two without gray hair. Young people have fled to the west. Some of them out of concern for their safety, and many more to satisfy long cherished dreams of getting the hell out of Ukraine.

This has to be a disaster for the economy. The people we see are almost certainly drawing pensions from rather than contributing to the economy. Capital cities are usually magnets for people from other parts of the country. Since 2014 Kyiv has been a destination for people fleeing the Russians in the East. Employment opportunities, and demand for housing had been increasing. It is an open question whether and how long it will take for the economy to regain that level of vitality.

I note one hopeful sign. The third of an acre lot that we bought a year ago January appears to have appreciated in value. There could be a few factors at work. Single-family houses are safer – less likely targets for Russians than apartment buildings. A bit of land gives you the opportunity to grow your own food, which was important in the downturn a quarter century ago and may be again. Lastly, Kyiv is far enough west that it is not likely to get folded into Russia. I'm glad we own this as money in the bank, but I suspect it will be a few years before there is enough rental demand to justify developing it.

Zoriana and my outing yesterday morning was shorter. She just likes to get out of the house – any excuse will do. I do targeted shopping. First, we went to the post office for the first time in a couple of weeks. Zoriana loves opening mail. After she ripped off the envelope, I glanced at the in-memoriam section of the Reed College quarterly magazine. It mentioned one of those girls who had been so available during the sexual revolution. That was a silly, self-indulgent time, building to nothing. It will be a while before I tell my kids about it, if at all.

We went to the big Novus supermarket to look for rye flour, an object that had eluded me for several weeks. No luck. We went to the meat store to see if they had beef ribs. The ones I bought yesterday in Podil, first I had seen after asking in six stores, were one third bone by weight. Not enough meat to use up the corned beef broth that I had prepared. This meat store had shoulder cuts instead of ribs, but I think it will work the same. Serendipitously, on the way out of the store I saw, of all things for a butcher shop, bags of rye flour. As I write this grandmother Nadia is downstairs making rye bread.

Waiting for the hourly bus, we killed 20 minutes buying stuff simply to fill my backpack – milk, cheese, yogurt and the like.  Zoriana once again got to be the only child and the object of attention of passengers whose own grandchildren are past her age.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men hope we will be the foundation of the new generation, but more often feel like we are the remnants of the last. I count my blessings that the good-looking woman I found likes the idea of children, and that the children she produced are a constant source of delight.

Graham