This week I was the volunteer to assist in the classified pouch run. Every so often the embassy sends and receives a batch of classified material. This requires some American officers with security clearances to go out to the airport and meet with a Diplomatic Courier who arrives with the incoming and departs with the outgoing.
At a McDonalds in Kyiv. Conversation is in Russian which somehow makes it funnier.
Young Man looking at the McDonalds menu board:
My crazy wife has tried to convince me that this sad blog still has readers and they are desperate for information on the happenings of my life. There is only one big thing to announce really and that is our next assignment. We’re going to anti-Ukraine.
We received our bid list last week. For those of you not up with Foreign Service lingo, the bid list is the list of job assignments available to me for my onward post. Although the list has about 400 different jobs around the world, because of many different limitations, there are really only about 20 that we need to be concerned with. I have to submit my list in about a month with 20 options ranked in preference.
There is something inherently wrong with living some place where you need to feel grateful when the temperature finally surpasses the freezing mark. After about two weeks of temperatures hovering between 10F and 17F, we’re finally to the point where my dog’s pee doesn’t instantly freeze into a yellow puddle next to the tree in front of our apartment.
The details on the situation are still a bit fuzzy, but a U.S. diplomat and his embassy driver were shot and killed in Khartoum, Sudan yesterday. He wasn’t much older than me and it doesn’t sound like he was doing anything any different than I was doing on New Year’s Eve. Scary stuff.
One of the strange aspects of Kyiv is the cost of living. It is very hard to quickly say whether this is a cheap or an expensive place. In the same way, it is hard to describe this place as Third World or First World. Ukraine seems to be in both places at once.
My wife says I don’t have to feel guilty about not blogging. The funny thing is, she’s right. (Not really funny ha ha, I guess, but you know what I mean.) I imagine somewhere at some university there is a grad student writing a thesis about the psychology of the blogosphere and why bloggers feel guilty about not constantly updating a site that few people read and most of that small number of people are strangers. Still, I feel bad about not giving my loyal readers a bit more to read so here is a mini update on life in Kyiv.
Yes, I know. I haven’t updated the blog in about two months. I’m a terrible, terrible blogger. The worst thing I could do now is a cheesy, cop-out post where I just cut and paste someone else’s work. That would be very bad of me.
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