Scotland Pictures

I had a blast in Scotland getting to see an old friend. The one day it was actually sunny we went out for a hike along the east coast of the country. Was in a small little town that is famous for its smoked fish - aptly named ...'smokies'. Was an awesome day all around, here are a few pictures.

Airport Fun

....so for some reason the entire thing I just wrote out disappeared because of a 'conlicting edits' error. So I'm going to have to summarize what I had wrote.

Left Scotland on Sunday.
Nothing appears to have changed in Ukraine.
Rained a lot in Scotland.
Gas crisis is starting to show its signs, or its just another political theater topic since the flu is getting old.

Viva Scotland

So it turns out that when I decided to fly to Scotland for a few days to see friends, that I was actually going to refresh my Spanish skills. I think about 80% of the people staying at the hostel speak Spanish, and some of them don't speak any English. Has been good, and surprisingly I still remember a lot.

In a few hours I take a train to go stay with the main person I came here to see. Until then, I may just relax here in the hostel.

Also, I watched someone throw up in a garbage can last night. Was amusing. Left and went to bed shortly after that.

Shoo Flu!

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but the only thing happening in Ukraine - still - is the flu. Fortunately for me I haven't been working much and have avoided going to the cafe/my second office for the last week or so. At this point, with the majority of the work in my contract completed, I am able to work on my own pace to finish some small projects that are informational and have no specific set of guidelines. They will be done when I'm done with them, and they don't have to include anything in particular. There is also a small project that I submitted for review/feedback 2 weeks ago. Maybe by January I'll get a response to that. Who knows.

Anyways, back to the flu talk. There are now rumors going around claiming that the variation of flu here is not H1N1, or regular flu, but instead a "super flu". Although it hasn't been confirmed, apparently a lot of the scientists and politicians are saying that the flu has mutated (possibly as a result of the less than stellar health care system here). How bad is the health care system you may ask? According to someone I had lunch with yesterday (an amazing $12 hamburger) who has a sick kid, after the hospitals got shipments of Tamiflu, all of the hospital employees were allowed to purchase some for themselves and their own family - and are now reselling them at 2 and 3 times the normal price. The doctor they took their kid too offered to sell them her box of Tamiflu for only 1000UAH, or about $12. While that doesn't sound like a lot, don't forget that Ukraine is begging for international help and taking all sorts of free medicine right now from people.

Oh, and just to further the idea of how much this is the only thing that is going on here, there are rumors/conspiracy theories that claim the aerial spray the government used before this break out was actually a bioweapon. This spray was supposedly sprayed from airplanes over the major cities as something that was supposed to kill the flu, but seeing as that hasn't worked, some people are claiming that it must have been a bioweapon by the government.

Oh, and this has continued to spread while the schools have been closed for 2 weeks (with one more week of closures). I can only imagine that once all of the kids go back to school and eat each others boogers that the second round of infections will start speeding up in the country. While I'm certainly not too worried about catching anything, I'm REALLY not looking forward to finding medical help here if I do. Is it too early to leave Ukraine to go home for Christmas?

I'm not dead yet

It's been a week since I wrote anything here. I haven't caught the flu, and am doing my best to avoid it. Other than going to the grocery store, I've been avoiding going outside. When I do go out, I've made sure to avoid opening any doors with my bare hands and touching things that someone sick may have touched.

The new figures state that over 1 million people have been sick in the last 3 weeks. This amounts to roughly 2% of the population. about 50,000 have been hospitalized, and 170ish have died. This means that if you happen to fall into the 2% of people who manage to get sick, you have a .017% chance of dying. Clearly you can see what has everyone worrying about a flu pandemic. From what I can read, this is on par with historical (and annual) flu outbreaks in Ukraine. It's just that this year its H1N2. As the week has gone on, you can see even more how the entire thing has been politicized. One day one of the presidents aides even mentioned the possibility of declaring a national emergency and pushing back the election because of the flu. ...The election in January. That idea has been put down since then.

As for me, I've been keeping busy with odds and ends of work that needs to get done. I "get" to reread all of the reports I previously wrote and edit out any politically sensitive/offensive information. Fortunately there isn't too much, and it's mainly related to the labs in Uzbekistan. Still, I'm going through all of the reports and making sure everything is good. In the process I've also found various typos that I made in the reports I turned in (like spelling 'patent' as 'parent'). Considering that it's been maybe 1 or 2 typos per report...and there was 140 pages of original writing...I'm not sure if that's a good sign or a bad sign.

I've also discovered that Ukraine gets Scotland weather in the winter. It's dark by 4:30 every day, the sun doesn't come out, and there's a 50% chance of rain everyday, and a 90% chance of drizzle. As I said while I was in Scotland years ago - no wonder everyone drinks by 9AM and smokes all day.

The line, you've crossed it.

This is proof things have officially gotten out of hand. People need to calm themselves down.

Running low on stock photos

A few weeks ago I came across a photo for the local online newspaper that was completely out of place. The article had something to do with teachers in Ukraine, and the stock photo they used was basically of a girl in a stripper/teacher uniform, similar to something you may find at a college campus on Halloween.

Today the paper has another confusing photo. Seen below, apparently this is the best they could come up with for a story about the local schools shutting down. It's worth mentioning that there are ZERO confirmed cases of swine flu in Kiev. Basically this entire thing is being blown out of proportion for the political gain of the presidential candidates. One met a shipment of 300k doses of Tamiflu at the airport today, while another is trying to organize meetings and taskforces and get WHO and EU support. Everyone is basically using this as a ploy to show how they would help the country as president.