calling home

(Axel watching the airplanes land 200 meters from our hotel room balcony.)

We spent our first night in the "Boryspil" Airport hotel (which is not to be confused with the Boryspil "Airport" hotel). I had reserved a single, which in Eastern European hotels means exactly that: a single, dorm-room size bed. Which was surfeit space anyway (see previous post). Axel spent most of the night playing with his new toys and climbing out of the bed. I spent most of the night fetching Axel's books which kept slipping between the mattress and the wall and praying.

Axel slept from just past midnight to just past four that night; and by 6am I gave up all hope of more sleep and trundled us off to breakfast, which I'm still thinking about a couple days later. I remember my first breakfast in Moscow, nineteen years ago. We all thought it so strange, the thick slice of dark bread with an equally thick slice of butter, accompanied by cold cuts and cold beet salad, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and salt. This morning, it all looked so familiar, with slight image updates: the composed salads were mandolin-thin, the butter do-it-yourself, the cold cuts thin shaves of ham, rather than the thick, fat-laced kielbasa. That was only a third of the offering at "Boryspil" hotel, and since we had a lot of time to kill, I helped myself to one of everything: blini, eggs, meat cutlet, battered fish, sausages, cold beet salad, carrot salad, cabbage salad, olives, ham, dried sausage, meusli, kefir, sliced fruit... I'm forgetting a few dishes.

Breakfast only took up half an hour of the eight before our flight. After that, I took Axel for a walk in the snow (10 minutes, he refused to even touch it with his shoe), tried to use the ATM (5 minutes, as someone cut ahead of me in line and then card malfunction), took Axel out on the balcony (four times at 3 minutes each), and then listened while he played with the hotel phone (three hours). Pushing the buttons, he informed me he "put Daddy on speaker," so that he could tell him about the "snow airport" (Munchen, where we spent two peaceable hours pulling the wheeled suitcase along the fast(er than the US) moving sidewalks. (This did involve a few Chaplin-style full body falls.) "I having a nice trip," he told daddy over the insistent beeping dial tone. We had to check-out at noon, which gave us not quite enough time to get into Kyiv and back and left us three hours to kill before our flight (with nowhere to leave our bags). Terrible planning, but given our 11pm arrival the night before, there was no earlier flight to take for Lviv.