milk and cookies

(Clothes-free Axel in our very warm Lviv apartment.)

This morning I was finally able to get some money (after three failed ATM attempts). For some reason my cards aren't working (don't? will never? work) in the ATM machines here. It made for a rather lean lunch, dinner and breakfast the day before (and an especially trying cashless three-hour wait in the Kyiv airport), but we persevered. On five kinds of starch.

Getting money turned out to be yet another test of a certain sleep-deprived person's patience. Even at the foreign currency exchange (of which there are so many in the small area of Lviv that we walked today, a strange largess in comparison to the one (!) for the entire Berkeley-Oakland area), it took the kind ladies several attempts and phone calls to get my card accepted; and then I had to buy dollars and change them to hryvnia. I was beginning to sweat our lack of funds a bit, because it was well after noon and I had nothing (nothing!) to feed my child. It was a trifle harrowing for me, but I shouldn't have worried: Axel, pissed off because the cafeteria-style restaurant did not have milk, refused to have anything to do with the nice blini and cutlet and egg and bread and cheese that I put in front of him. He managed to hold out until we found the bakery, where I stocked up on two kinds of cookies (sushki and jam-filled tiny planks, whose name I don't know).

And also standbys, just as I remembered them from years ago: vermicelli noodles, black bread, kefir, and smetana, each of which earned only passing interest from Axel. So it's been cookies and milk for him today.