Getting ready for winter

It's starting to get cold here in Zakarpattia - unexpectedly cold. The forecast for this weekend is a high of 33 degrees F. Since most of the clothes I brought are summer clothes - shorts, tee-shirts, short-sleeved shirts - I had to go to the bazaar today to buy a winter coat. I wasn't in any mood to search through the hundreds of shops, so I just bought the first coat that fit. The cost - 600 hrivna (about $50 USD), even cheaper than Walmart prices. I didn't even bother haggling with the vendor over the price.

Ivan and Klara are also getting ready for winter. Ivan butchered all of the chickens, (maybe chickens don't like cold weather?), and Klara pulled the last of the vegetables out of the ground - carrots, parsley, and parsley root.

I've never even seen parsley root sold in stores in America, but here they use the root in soups along with the leaves.

One surprise in the garden is chrysanthemums. Flowers are supposed to be dead by now, but the chrysanthemums have just started to bloom in the last few days.

Klara and Ivan own another acre of land in a field near Misha's house. This acre had been planted in corn, potatoes, pumpkins, and squash. They've all been harvested weeks ago, but now the ground was tilled and seeded with some grain seeds - oats? barley? rye? wheat?. They hired a man with tractor to prepare the soil, then he spread the seed by hand, then used the tractor to cover them up.

Yesterday, Misha had picked the red grapes, and we crushed them. Today, Misha put the crushed pommace through the wine press, and put the juice in the barrels. Misha said that with this type of grape, unless the juice is separated from the pommace early, the wine will be very bitter. BTW, they call these "red" grapes, but they still look purple to me.

I left Misha to press the grapes, while I went into the city to run some errands, and to go to the English School. In the town square, I saw one of my new friends volunteering at a political booth. I won't mention his name, or party affiliation, because he told me that some thugs from other parties had been threatening the volunteers at his booth. On the way to the School, I took a few photos of cars on the street, just to show that Ukrainians don't drive old Soviet pieces of crap. There are plenty of BMW's, Audi's, Mercedes, Lexus, Hundai, Toyota, etc, etc, etc to be seen. I still don't know how they afford them, when the average monthly salary is about $300 USD. 

At the English Language School, I had a new class of little monsters.