Wow, I can’t believe two weeks of holidays are gone, like a poof! Almost half of it we spent with our best friends Michelle and Dan in the Empress hotel in Victoria BC. What can I say?–you get used to the luxury really fast and don’t want it to end. Ever. The luxurious beds, magnificent breakfast and High Tea in the afternoon; ginormous indoor pool; super-attentiveness of the staff  (we even got presents on Christmas Day–a stocking full of candy and tea).

Victoria is a teeny town, with small streets and very friendly people. Bums are rare, and they ask you to “spare a smile”… We didn’t just sit at the hotel though but went to see the Craigdarroch castle. Built in 1890 by coal baron Robert Dunsmuir for his wife (the guy didn’t live to see the castle. But she did. She inherited the castle along with some odd $20 million). It is rather small compared to the castles of Polish royalty, but still with gorgeous numerous rooms.

Back in the hotel we had experienced traditional High Tea, which originated in early Victorian era when the Duchess of Bedford felt blue. She started to have tea and little snacks and this tradition grew into being High Tea. We had tea in fancy bone china and there were tiered plates with sandwiches and sweets.

Please see our album for complete visual experience;) http://atoz.zgrafika.com/gallery/victoria-bc-2008/

Невозможно быстро пролетели две недели отдыха. Половину этого времени, на Рождество, мы провели в канадском местечке Виктория, куда плыли на пароходе часа три. В Виктории мы с друзьями сняли комнату в гостинице-люкс Императрица и пребывали там 4 дня наслаждаясь пуховыми матрасами, великолепными завтраками и огромным бассейном. Также в гостинице мы попробовали традиционное английское чаепитие– Высокий Чай. Согласно истории викторианских времён,  баронесса из Бедфорда страдала от падения сил во второй половине дня и помогал ей чай и маленькие бутерброды. Отсюда произошла эта традиция. Чаепетие весьма церемонное, приносят целый фарфоровый сервиз и трёхэтажные блюда с маленькими закусками. Красиво и очень вкусно. Действительно, поднимает силы:)

Но мы не просто сидели в гостинице, а также побывали на экскурсии с замке Крейгдаррок (Craigdarroch). Замок-бонанза (термин употреблявшийся по отношению к массивной архитектуре, воздвигнутой благодаря быстрому обогащению предприятельных баронов во времена индустриальной революции) был построен в 1890 году нефтяным бароном Робертом Дунсмуиром. Он строил замок по просьбе своей жены, но сам до завершения стройки не дожил. Жена в итоге унаследовала замок и порядка 20 миллионов долларов. Замок конечно маловат, в сравнении с польскими например. Но тем не менее в 4-этажном замке 39 комнат, все отреставрированны в духе викторианских времён.

Сам городок Виктория весьма уютен, с улочками, уходящими вглубь, как аллеи, и очень доброжелательным народом.

Смотрите наш новый альбом http://atoz.zgrafika.com/gallery/victoria-bc-2008/

Over the past few weekends I’ve been working on some home improvement projects as in getting the NYC subway diagram printed to go with our existing NY picture, putting up the shelf in the kitchen and mounting two Flying Vee Shelves, the only item we could afford at Design Within Reach:))

За последние несколько выходных я сделала несколько проэктов по дому: распечатала карту метро Нью Йорка, что смотрится с нашей огромной фотографией города, повесила полку на кухне и повесила две Летучие Полки из магазина Доступный Дизайн. Стоит заметить, что эти полки были единственными доступными по цене:)))

Adam the tailor couldn’t find my pants. Devastated, he looked and looked, then took my number and said he’d call when they turn up. In his tiny shop, orders are piling up. He works alone and can’t afford bigger space or extra help. The pants did turn up. They were right in front of us, and we both didn’t notice. Along with those pants came a great story he shared with me.

Adam is from Vietnam. He now lives in Renton with his family. As I understood his daughter graduated from Yale and he’s very proud of her. He escaped communist Vietnam in  1980 in a small boat. Lived in Phillipines and came to U.S in 1992. All those years he was separated from his wife and daughter. He told me, in the 70’s Vietnam was like North Korea. Communist officials would raid your house and break the walls looking for gold. If you tried to escape in a boat, like Adam did, the patrol would shoot. But since officials were corrupt, sometimes they would just take everything of value, gold, money so you would keep on moving.

“Here is freedom. You have to work very hard but here is freedom.”

He makes an emphasis on the word “freedom” and his eyes light up.

Портной Адам у которого я частенько чиню вещи, потерял мои новые брюки, которые я снесла ему неделю назад. Безнадёжно обыскав всё крохотное помещеньице в котором заказы кучатся как мухи, Адам взял мой номер, чтобы позвонить как только брюки найдутся. Они нашлись, и забирая их я ненароком узнала Адамову историю.

Он бежал из коммунистического Вьетнама в 80-м, в крохотной лодчонке, по которой стреляли. Жена и ребёнок остались во Вьетнаме и их он не увидит ещё десять лет, до 90-х. Бежал он в Филиппины, потом в 1992 иммигрировал в Америку. Теперь живёт в Рентоне, дочка выпустилась из Ейл (Yale University), но Адам хорошо помнит Вьетнам, где в его дом могли ворваться и взломать стены в поисках золота.

“Тут свобода”, сказал Адам на сильно ломанном английском, “надо тяжело работать, но свобода”. При этом глаза его воодушевлялись, когда он произносил это слово.

Дорогие русскоязычные посетители! Приглашаю читать впечатления на русском в разделе Travel

http://atoz.zgrafika.com/category/travel/

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It started raining on the third day and hasn’t stopped for two weeks with temperatures in mid-40’s. And we didn’t really packed anything warm enough. My brave shoes tried to hold up for the whole week. Then they started to leak. Sigh.

Cars. Cars everywhere. Driving with no rules, even on sidewalks. Said sidewalks are packed with parked cars too. Having a car is a status symbol and the more expensive the car the better. But what an irony—Toyota Camry is considered prestigious there! We’ve developed a phobia, turning around every time we hear a sound—maybe there’s a car behind us.

Lines. Lines everywhere. The post-Soviet habit is hard to get rid of. Well, in reality lines come from major inefficiencies: out of three check out stands only one will work and the girl there doesn’t know her job well. Or customers in the same meat department in the grocery store will be divided into three lines, where salesperson on the left will not help you because you picked meat from the right and that’s apparently different department although they are inches away.

Line to the notary, line to pay your bills at the local post-office. And everybody tries to butt in in front of you!

When we were flying back and landed in JFK, this grumpy bunch of Ukrainians poured out of the plane and New Yorkers met their match:) People tried to butt in the line to the passport control, tried to pick fight in Ukrainian with English-speaking staff… Oh, it was wonderful to watch!:)

Customer service. Level zero. Yes, people are still rude and in many cases simply unwilling to work. In fact we saw a job opening posted in the subway, and one of the requirements was : “desire to work”.
Nothing is opened before ten. We went to seek breakfast in one of the restaurants that was supposed to be open at 9 am only to find it closed with a little handwritten note attached to original number “9″. It said “10″.
Or in a major coffee shop that carries quite a big selection of exotic teas our friends and Andrew ordered mate tea that comes in special teapot with special aluminum sipping straw that has a strainer on the end. Without the strainer it is very hard to drink this kind of tea. The waitress brings three teapots and one aluminum straw. And a bunch of plastic ones. My friend inquires about two other straws and gets a reply: “They’re all broken”. My friend calmly tries to explain to the waitress that maybe if they all broken she should have warned them so they would order something else. Waitress, no apology in the eye, says: “Well, we are a coffee house we’re not specialists in the tea”.

Speaking about coffee. Good coffee is hard to find in Kiev. It is understandable, people are mostly black tea-drinkers. If you’re drinking coffee at home your option will be instant coffee that is wildly popular. It’s not nasty but it ain’t good. In the coffee shop your choices are espresso-based. Espresso is ok, but everything else… The difference between American way to drink coffee and Ukrainian: Americans add milk to their coffee, Ukrainians vise versa. I couldn’t detect coffee in most cappuccinos and lattes. Drip coffee is non-existent. I only tried it once and couldn’t find it anymore. It was my happy day.

Young people on the streets look like they’ve just stepped out from pages of a fashion magazine. Everyone who’s below 35 years of age dresses well. And everybody possesses a designer bag. When I saw a Fendi bag the starting price of which would be around $3000 here in the US I started to wonder how an average working girl with minimal wage salary of $400 a month would be able to afford that? You know the answer. They’re all fakes. But people don’t care. It is sad really, Ukrainian designers offer their beautiful and unique work for a fraction of the price it would cost, but no one buys it because nobody cares about their work. Everyone wants fake Versace.

Speaking about style, although the taste in clothes is generally pretty good, the overall taste is what I like to call “Disastrous Clusterfuck”. I saw some furniture in boutique stores: massive, painted gold clash of styles with drapes on top. In the major department store downtown Kiev I saw patterns I wish I never see again. And the huge (and wildly successful) market “Darynok” that sells clothes made me wonder who dresses there: surely I haven’t seen anything they sell on those fashionable people on the streets.

…Some areas of the city did change dramatically. There are new “elite” neighborhoods, where apartments are being sold for more than they would cost here in US. There are new additions to downtown, specifically Independence Square. But where my mom lives it is still the same. Old Soviet 5-story brick buildings that are slowly falling apart. And yet new people are moving in and raising families. I saw my mom’s new neighbor with a 2-year old boy. It feels so unreal, somebody’s childhood will be where my childhood was, in that old crumbling building…

Every morning Andrew has a dilemma of choosing what to wear that day. So to help him out I put together a StyleGen (Style Generator) which pulls two random images together to create an outfit every time page refreshes. The images are Andrew’s own collection of clothes and the randomizer is a simple php string. I couldn’t help but to brag about it. Check it out here:

http://zgrafika.com/stylegen.php

Каждое утро Андрей сталкивается с проблемой, что одеть. Чтобы ему помочь, я создала небольшую страничку с помощью кода php. Два разных варианта выбираются из коллекции одежды мужа при обновлении страницы. Смотрите сами!

http://zgrafika.com/stylegen.php