MoldovAnn

Day Two started and ended pleasantly. The in-between hours were pretty chaotic and stressful, though.

Alessandra arrived late last night. She, Cristina and I talked for an hour or so, and then the two of them stayed up even later talking after I finally went to bed around midnight. Tuesday morning, Cristina was off to work before 9, but Alessandra and I decided to take it a bit slower. We asked all the requisite questions and found out a lot about each other. She is 29 (actually, tomorrow is her birthday, so we get to have a party already!), from Italy. She studied law and international relations. She worked for one year for an Italian NGO in Tajikistan, and then spent the last year working as a UNV in Kyrgyzstan. She’s already given me quite a bit of insight into the beast that is U.N. Bureaucracy, and I’m very grateful for her experience with UNV as she knows all the right questions to be asking, knows what we should be receiving, what we need to know, etc.

So, we putzed around the apartment all morning and finally headed to the UN House, where Cristina’s office is located, around 12 and made a few calls to see apartments. By 12:30 we were off to the CRDP office, which is about a 5 minute walk up the street from the UN House. This was Alessandra’s first visit to the office, so there were lots of introductions to be made, and both she and Pavlo were anxious to talk with each other about the project. Micezyslaw, a.k.a. Mietek, and I compared some notes about our progress in the apartment hunt, I checked email, and then the slow process of getting a large group of people out of the door to go to lunch commenced. It took nearly an hour to actually achieve that small bit of progress, and we had lunch at a nearby cafeteria-style restaurant.

Tuesday afternoon one of the CRDP drivers took us around the city to see apartments. It seems the most common way to find housing is through an agency, and the standard commission is 1/2 of one month’s rent for the apartment you rent. We had contacted 3 or 4 different agents and we quickly had a half dozen appointments scheduled. Cristina’s lease is ending and she needs to find a new apartment, too, so that meant a troop of 4 UNVs (Cristina, Mietek, Alessandra, and me) searching together. We realized pretty quickly that we all have different expectations and requirements for our respective housing needs, yet we all have the same monetary restrictions. We saw one place today that we all agreed was a good place, but being the first day of apartment-hunting, no one was ready to fully commit to taking it. We left a deposit with the agent and said that one of us would take the apartment, we just needed another day to decide which one of us would take it. Crazy, huh?

After about 4 hours on the apartment hunt, Mietek, Alessandra and I ended up back at Cristina’s apartment. We prepared a late dinner, drank some wine that Alessandra brought from Italy, and got to know each other better. Mietek is full of interesting and funny stories. We learned he has a 16-year old daughter and a son at University in Poland. Mietek loves to travel and we talked about the many travel opportunities on weekends and holidays around Ukraine. We all want to see Odessa and the Crimea, and it sounds like Mietek’s knows some good not-so-touristy spots that are really worth seeing.

Tomorrow we will mainly focus on finding housing. This is a pretty stressful introduction to our new lives here in Kiev, and poor Alessandra – she’s never been to Kiev before, probably won’t get to do any sightseeing for awhile!