eating perogies from a jar at the Moldovan border

it's a labour of love, boiling up bowl after bowl of perogies when it's 35C outside and 41C in the kitchen. but you see, i knew i was leaving the country soon.

so in Odessa I would have perogies for lunch, then go to the beach and swim and watch the characters (an old woman standing around with seaweed carefully smoothed over her nose and chest...an old man with Einstein hair, two teeth, two pairs of glasses - one over the other - standing with his hands on the waistband of his shorts as though he's getting ready to tear them off at any moment), and then come back and eat some more.

in Kiev and Lviv i was able to go to cheap restaurants and point at a vat of dumplings or cabbage rolls and get what i wanted, but in Odessa i decided to go a different route (more adventurous or less adventurous? can't decide) and buy them frozen at the grocery store.

problem of course is I can't read the writing on the package (ok, i've mostly figured out the Cyrillic alphabet and could sound out the words, but wouldn't know what they mean).
day 1 - brought home a package, boiled it up, got REALLY excited, smothered them with butter and sour cream and...bit into a dumpling filled with ground beef hearts and potato.
day 2 - another try, this time they were stuffed with sweet cottage cheese. more acceptable than the vile beef heart variety but still not the potato and onion goodness i was hoping for.
day 3 - third time's a charm! it's the GREEN package. that's all I can tell you.

my last night I boiled up a full bag and stuffed the leftovers into an empty pickle jar, and took it to eat on the bus to Moldova the next day.

My neighbour on the bus was looking at me a bit funny, but he turned out to be the kind of guy who isn't allowed into the country even when he hides 70 griven in the back of his Georgian passport and slips it to the border guard. we left him behind at the Moldovan border.

Luckily I was able to get through no problem as I took a bus that bypasses Transnistria (daily at 11am from Odessa->Chisinau) in order to avoid the bribe shakedown and hours of wasted hours at the border. It still took about 6 hours (for two cities that are less than 200km apart).

then of course i was supposed to meet my CouchSurfing host, Irina...unfortunately my cell phone was dead and there was no internet around so i tried to get to the centre on my own. normally this isn't a problem but for some reason i missed the centre and ended up at the end of the minibus line. so the drivers put me back on a bus in the opposite direction and seemed to say they would tell me where to get off this time. but then, after we'd been driving for about 5 minutes the driver got off his cell phone, stopped the van, took my bags out and put them in someone's driveway, and gestured vaguely toward the garage. then drove off while i stood there gaping like a fool in the middle of nowhere for about 5 minutes, waiting for something to happen. finally another bus came by.