Day 9, Exploring with friends

Today was full of adventure.  We did two loads of laundry in the bathtub and went out exploring with friends.
We planned to see Max tomorrow, so today we claimed as Laundry day!  We don't have a washer in our apartment (boo) so we had to do all our laundry by hand.  The first mission was to find laundry detergent.  Many groceries have only food items, so we were unsuccessful finding detergent there.  Then I thought maybe we could find it at a pharmacy.  No luck there either.  The other day we noticed detergent at a little market, but Doug said it was extremely high in price.  After looking multiple places with no luck, we went to the little market and bit the bullet to buy the high priced detergent.  Thankfully, the price was not near what we had thought-- it was on a high shelf and we had not seen the decimal point!
With detergent in hand, it was time to use our new learned knowledge from Wikipedia of how to wash clothes by hand to use.  Doug put water in the tub, then some detergent, mixed it by hand until it dissolved, then added the clothes.

Together we rinsed and rung out each article of clothing.  Our apartment has a balcony with a clothesline, so we hung much of our clothing out there.  (Thankfully the balcony is glassed in, so none of our socks or underwear are flying over the city!)

We had plans to meet Laurie and Bryan at 3:30 and go to the zoo.  I enjoy going to the zoo wherever we travel.  It is so neat to see the difference in the atmosphere and the animals they have.  What we have found is that the animals are in smaller enclosures than what we are use to at home and many animals are closer to you than what they allow you to be at home.  Maybe that's because in America they do everything they can to protect you and your stupidity and here they acknowledge that people either know better than to jump in and swim with the hippos or if they don't--well, natural consequences!  So many people bring food/scraps to feed the animals.
Here are just a few pictures/videos I took today.

After the zoo, we went to a local Ukrainian cafeteria.  It is a place that has all kinds of foods and you can read the translation of the food items and point to what you want.  We got a huge amount of food (so many things to try) for $12!

I had borscht, chicken, dill potatoes, and a yummy dessert.

After dinner, it was time for gelato.  OH-my-goodness.  I was in heaven!  This cute little shop had 10 different flavors of gelato.  Doug got pistachio, I had strawberry, Laurie had yogurt, and Bryan had chocolate.  It was DELICIOUS!  I would gladly walk the 45 minute trek back for more!  There is a place we spotted on our walk home that has gelato that we are going to have to try tomorrow!!