Who says it only rains in Seattle?:))

Кто сказал, что у нас не бывает снега? Оказывается бывает и ещё как!

Winter Wonderland from Zlata Zubenko on Vimeo.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Seattle video

Каждый год после Дня Благодарения в Сиетле проходит парад устроенный магазином Мэйсис. Парад вообщем-то зародился в Нью-Йорке в 1927 году, но у нас тут своя версия. Ещё в этом же видео вы увидите, как долго зажигались огни на ёлке. Такие глюки в Сиетле уже традиция (на Новый Год салют сглючил):

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2008 from Zlata Zubenko on Vimeo.

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

As we do it every year, we went to lake Roosevelt this weekend (with our friends Taras and Alex). Four-hour drive was totally worth it. We spent Saturday and a good half of a Sunday on a beach, swimming, fooling around and eating meat hot off the grill, prepared by skillful Taras.

Late Sunday afternoon we took off Seattle-bound but making a pit stop at the roadside diner somewhere outside of Coulee City (population: 600). Our friends continued on their trip while we finished our lunch. We got back to our car, I turned the key and…nothing. Not even a coughing, trying sound the car makes when it can’t start. Again and again, all in vain. Hoping and praying that it’s just dead battery we went back to the diner asking good people there for help. One employee’s husband came by with jumper cables. After several tries our car still wouldn’t start. The guy then brought out the big guns: calle his friend with a pick-up truck. Our car started from a pick-up truck charge. The guy said not to turn any lights or AC on and whatever we do-do not turn the engine off! And clean up the corrosion around the cable, that’s probably why the battery went dead in the first place.

So I drove for another 4 hours without stops, straight to Seattle where we parked our car outside the car shop so they would fix it tomorrow. As soon as we turned the engine off, the battery died again (as expected).

And as if it wasn’t enough, we got harassed by a homeless person, who was very concerned that our car will get towed if we leave it there. “I warned you!” he kept shouting.

I hope he wasn’t right.

Как обычно каждое лето мы ездим на озеро Рузвельт. Вот и в этот раз поехали с друзьями Тарасом и Сашей. 4-часовая поездка на машине стоила того. Озеро было замечательное, мы провели всю субботу и половину воскресенья на пляже и поедая приготовленное Тарасом мясо. А вечером жгли костёр и пили пиво.

В воскресенье отчалили домой, по дороге останавливаясь в придорожном кафе где-то в степи. Съев по сочному бургеру мы собрались ехать дальше, но машина не заводилась. Ещё раз и ещё раз, всё без толку, даже не кашлянула ни разу. Отчаянно надеясь, что это всего лишь севший аккумулятор, мы вернулись в кафе просить о помощи. Помогать приехал пожилой муж одной из работниц. Он несколько раз попытался завести наш мотор от своей легковушки, но всё без толку. Проблему осложняло ещё то, что наш аккумулятор был покрыт коррозией-конечно же нам не пришло в голову проверять это дело вовремя. Мужичок не сдался-откуда-то он взял своего друга на грузовике и от мощного мотора грузовика наша машина завелась! Со строгим наказом не выключать мотор и не включать фары, мы не останавливаясь домчали до Сиетла и решили поставить машину на парковке ремонтной мастерской, чтобы с утра сдать им в починку. Как только мы выключили мотор-аккумулятор умер. Но мы уже были у себя дома так сказать:)

Ко всем этим неприятностям добавился бомж, которого очень волновало, что нашу машину отбуксируют за парковку в неположенном месте. Он долго кричал нам вслед: “Я вас предупреждал!”

Завтра посмотрим, может и вправду успеют отбуксировать?

Фотки есть и много и видео чуток. Но надо время, так что всё будет попозже.

Пока вот мы, с нашей палаткой.