“Surly” is the word

Somehow this morning I forgot that New Year’s is the BIGGEST HOLIDAY EVER in Ukraine. And I made a horrible mistake: I went to the grocery store. I cannot adequately put into words the scene that met me when I entered the store (after wading through the pack of street dogs that had taken residence just inside the entryway, of course). Being from the Midwest, I would liken it to what would happen if the biggest blizzard of the year was being predicted to hit the night before Thanksgiving. But add in the general pushiness factor of Ukraine, and subtract the general overly-polite factor of the Midwest. It was not a pretty picture. I think I even saw riots breaking out at the Kievsky Tort counter. How I managed to survive, I don’t know.

But on a more positive note, I have a finished craft project to share. A few months ago, I stumbled upon this site with a crochet pattern for mini safety cones. My first thought was that they were the most adorable things I’d ever seen. And then I started reading about how people associate these orange cones with safety and protection. I realized that after a year and a half in Kyiv, my associations are totally different. Here, orange cones are either used to designate where one should not park – there’s absolutely no authority associated with this; it’s often business owners trying to keep cars off the sidewalks in front of their shops – or I’ve also seen them used by the traffic police as just another way to extract bribes. And I realized that Ukrainian orange cones would not be the happy-go-lucky cones that the pattern shows. They would be cranky…surly, even. And so I present to you, Surly Ukrainian Traffic Cones:

Aren’t they cute? In their own cranky post-Soviet sort of way?