We are in Max's apartment after a long day in Kyiv.
We have our train tickets for all of us to travel from Donetsk to Kyiv on next Saturday night. (the nice lady at the passport office there offered to come in on Saturday if we could not get all the papers done on Friday. So we took a chance and booked the train (since tickets are so hard to come by).
Last night's ride was okay. I slept better than I thought I would and never came close to crashing to the floor (Mary was worried every time I turned over so she DID wake up each time I moved).
Last night things almost went very bad. A large Ukrainian woman in a wheel chair boarded at our stop--needless to say things are NOT ADA compliant here and she could not get in her cabin on the train. She tried to lift herself but fell to the ground. Max and I rushed to pick her up-- I had the heavy end and right after thought about how I probably just killed my back lifting this 250 lb woman to her bunk--- I am happy to report no significant back pain today! YAY!!! I got to do a good deed and not get punished for it!!
We fly out for a "vacation" tomorrow to Munich (actually a little town nearby called Erding) There is a Roman Spa there and the brewery of our favorite German Beer. (we are members of the fan club!). We will tour the brewery, get to daily Mass (which we have missed dearly), spend time in the Spa (textile, order nicht?) train in to Munich maybe once or twice and perhaps get to the Monestary at Andechs. It will be nice to actually speak the language (well, at least sort of).--- Actually I am very humbly impressed with how good our Russian is getting. We are ordering from the menu, I have my Cyrillic down pretty good. We took the subway on our own downtown, stopped by the cafeteria ordered our food in Russian and grabbed the subway back (actually we overshot by a stop and had to backtrack) but another couple of weeks and "look out Czar Nick!"
We will fly from Munich directly to Donetsk on Saturday in time for Sasha to drive us to our afternoon visit with Daniilka! We miss him and all of our family back home sooooooooo much and want this to be over and all of us be together!!
************** Radio Alert*************** Radio Alert************************
All non-radio people stop reading or your eyes will glaze over!
I spent this afternoon with the fine folks from the Ukrainian Independent Broadcasters Association (they are the Ukrainian version of the NAB). I met them after reading an article in the Kyiv Post last year and we have been working on getting together.
Some interesting facts about Radio here:
Total radio revenue in the entire country is $28 million
Max of 8 minutes of commercials per hour (does that kill you Jim and Mike?)
50% of all music product must be Ukrainian
all commercials must be in Ukrainian (even in eastern Ukraine where everyone speaks Russian)
Unless you have a special station licence all personalities must also speak only Ukrainian
Radio controls only 3% of the ad dollars behind print, TV, outdoor and tied with transit.
there are no real formats here- only Pop and Schlager (ethnic old folks music-- think Classic Country)
No real programing research --- program directors (with some help from the oligarchy) decide playlists.
I will be helping the folks here on a couple of projects as time permits---
Radio here could explode! It is as ubiquitous as in the US but the government needs to stop thinking of it as a political tool and start to let the free market decide what is best.
************** End of Radio Alert*************** End of Radio Alert************************
We will not be posting while in Germany and our phones will not work there. We'll leave word with the kids as to how to reach us
Check back on Saturday for our next update!
SEE YA!
Jim and Mary
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