Our swimming pool adventure

We decided to take the kids swimming today with the Benson's. We had asked Masha if she knew where the swimming pool was and thought she had said yes. So we rounded up the Benson's two girls, Masha and Nastia, Katya, and the Lawrence's boy, Ruslan, got permission from the teacher and were off. We stood at the orphanage exit and asked Masha which direction to go and she said, "Nis naio" (I don't know). Uh oh! Of course, Katya and Ruslan had no idea where the swimming pool was so we called Elena. Elena said she would find out but she was on the train and when she called us back her call got disconnected. At that moment, the orphanage's attorney was walking by and Masha grabbed her and wrote down directions. Before I continue, I have to say something about the orphanage attorney. Attorneys in the Ukraine dress much differently than they do in the US. She reminds me of Rease Witherspoon in "Legally Blonde" - just not so pink! Anyway, Masha wrote down directions so we let her lead the way. We walked, and walked, and walked. On the way, Masha kept insisting that we needed to take the bus, but we had the stroller, the baby car seat, a bunch of stuff in the stroller, and we had ten people including Tony. Some of those buses look pretty packed and the thought of fitting us all on one didn't sound appealing, so we kept telling Masha that the bus was not an option. So, after walking about 45 minutes, we ended up at the swimming pool - NOT! We ended up at the bus terminal at the end of main street! So, in the end, we divvied up our stuff, collapsed the stroller and got on bus 22a. Bus 22a took us all the way back up main street in the direction we had come from. As we are traveling back, we are all thinking about how long it took us to walk down that way, in the heat, and I think all the adults had figured that we were not really going to end up at the swimming pool but back where we had started. In the end, the bus did turn and dropped us off across the street from the swimming pool. Thanks Masha, for getting us there! NOTE: Had we actually known where the swimming pool was to begin with, we could have walked there and might have actually ended up walking less. But the important thing is that we made it there!

Getting into the pool was another adventure. Unless you are wearing flip flops, they will not let you wear your outside shoes because they don't want the pool area to get dirty. So we had to "rent" flip flops for Katya. And...the pool isn't really very cheap to get into. It was about $25 for me, Alex, Katya, Allie, and Tony. After you pay, they give you these wrist bands that you scan at a turnstyle gate to get into the shower areas. They also give you these keys so that you can put all your stuff in a locked locker. We thought this was great because it meant our stuff could be secure. However, you don't actually take the key with you into the pool area - you give it to the locker room attendant, who then hangs the key in an unlocked box on the wall. After we had finished swimming, the locker attendant wasn't even in the locker room anymore and we had to go and retrieve our own key from the wall. So much for secure. What is the point of that???

Once in the shower areas, you must shower off in order to be allowed into the pool area. Unlike in America, where you keep your bathing suit on to shower, here they make you strip down. The girls had no qualms about walking around naked, but Jen and I did. To make it worse, the shower room nazi stood in the showers to make sure that we showered off. Jen and I took as long as we could helping the naked girls shower off and luckily the lady stepped out long enough for Jen and I to escape the shower area without showering naked. Once inside the pool area, we were still not safe. They had a pool side nazi that literally checked you over to make sure that you had no dirt on you. She checked your hands, your feet, your arms, back, etc. She even made Jen lift up her bathing suit top to make sure she wasn't hiding any dirt under it. Alex said he didn't pass the dirt test and was sent back to the shower area to wash off again. The funniest thing is that we had Tony with us, in his swimming suit, we had paid for him to swim to and they didn't even look at him. He had the potential to be the most hazardous of us all (they didn't know that he had a swim diaper and rubber pants on). He could be the cause of a cryptosporidian outbreak in the Ukraine. Oh brother!

So after we finally made it into the swimming pool, the water was a little bit cold but I didn't mind too much since it was so hot outside that it was nice to be a little cold for a while. The swimming pool was actually a lap pool, divided up into lanes. At one end of the pool, they had metal piping with glass sitting on top of it that made it so the water was shallow enough for the kids to get in without drowning. I think the kids had fun, although Ruslan only swam about 20 minutes and then decided that the water was too cold. Katya is like a little fish. She was in the deep end, learning how to dive from Jen, would have gone off the diving board if we had let her (we didn't know if we really trusted her swimming skills enough), did somersaults, and dove down and touched the bottom of the pool. Allie wasn't quite as daring as Katya, but she could swim well enough to go in the deep end. She was trying to teach Katya how to dive, but it was funny because she would hold her arms like she was going to dive and then she would say to Katya, "like this" but in the end all she really did was jump in the water. Jen then tried to teach Allie how to dive, but Allie ended up doing a belly-flop that didn't feel so swell and Allie gave up. Katya did some pretty good dives and and we will definately be putting her in swimming lessons when we get home. Alex wanted me to make sure that I let everybody know that he saved Nastia's life (this is probably a bit of an exaggeration!). The glass floor that made the pool shallow only covered about 1/3 of the pool. Nastia was hopping along and hopped right off the end and luckily Alex was standing right there and grabbed her before she actually went under water. Nastia had the biggest look of relief on her face because she had realized at that moment that the platform was no longer there - it was so cute!

We went back to the orphanage after lunch and had the kids watch the letter DVD and then wandered up to the playground to see what was going on. The kids weren't really playing anything fun and we were so beat from all the walking that we were just going to go back the apartment when Katya said she wanted to call Elena. We have limited Katya's calls to Elena to one or two a day, since if we let her she would call Elena about twenty times a day. Since Katya hadn't called Elena at all that day we agreed. Katya told Elena that there was a concert that was about to start that Katya said was "very important" and that she would be "very sad" if we didn't go. So Alex escaped home with Tony (no fair!) and me, my mom, and Allie stayed. This "very important" concert ended up being a skit that the Americans put on that we had no idea what it was about. Even when one of them told us that the lesson was about stealing no understanding was gained. Maybe we were just too tired...Anyway, after the "very important concert" was over, it was pouring outside. The weather here is funny. It will be hot one minute and pouring the next. It reminds me of Florida. We waited for the rain to stop and then left. And that concludes our very important day!

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