Paradise City

     FRIDAY!!!! Actually, Friday now doesn't mean the same thing to me as it did a year ago. Since I don't currently work a regular 9-5 job, my concept of a weekend and day's off doesn't really mesh with my past experience. Instead, I tend to think about my "work week" as the time I spend in activities like English Club, church, and ministry-related events.

     Well, Spring has sprung. The city is all sorts of green again. Grass is growing tall. Flowers are everywhere. The dandelions have just about finished their first bloom. Most have blown away in the wind by now. But most interesting of all, the symbol of Kiev, the chestnut tree, is in full bloom.
     I was riding home from church on Sunday with a friend and she pointed out the freshly-bloomed flowers. Now I can hardly look anywhere without seeing them. After getting back to my apartment, I went out onto my balcony and counted nine different chestnut trees. They're everywhere. The sidewalk by the office is lined with them. This week and last, we had several rain storms. It seems like that's what the trees were waiting for.
     Originally in Ukraine, you could only see white-flowering chestnut trees. Recently, though, pink-flowered variants were imported. The flowery stalks in Ukrainian and Russian are called "candles." That's not the correct anatomical term but rather what people refer to them as. You can see this symbol of Kiev all over the city. On cake containers, ice cream wrappers, the Pechersk Lavra, and lining sidewalks.
     And now for something completely different. I've discovered a new thing to cook! Back in college, I'd occasionally go to a restaurant called Butcher Shop. They served burgers and all sorts of meat-related dishes. But one of the things I remember best (besides the awesome burgers) was the chili. Thrown on a handful of shredded cheddar and it was amazing. I've finally found a good recipe for making my own. My upstairs neighbors (the McLanes) passed this along to me. Definitely grateful for this one.

     To finish things off, I received a few questions related to the Chernobyl trip from a couple weeks ago plus one random one.
1. Were the houses in the Exclusion Zone bulldozed to keep people from moving back?
The buildings were bulldozed to bury the radiation. At the time, they didn’t have a lot of good methods to deal with it. The dust from the explosion covered everything. They tried washing it off of the buildings. But when that slurry dried on the ground, the wind kicked it up and it got all over the buildings again. The best solution at the time was to bulldoze and bury the buildings.
2. Can anything be done to lessen the radiation?
There are substances that absorb the radiation but they aren’t very effective in such a large area. And you still need to dispose of them afterward. In the days after the accident, crews of liquidators dropped 5000 tonnes of sand, lead and boric acid into the broken reactor. The boric acid is used as a neutron-absorber. By absorbing neutrons, the nuclear reaction was stifled. Those materials are still in there after 30 years. However, the reactor is still one of the most dangerous places in the whole Exclusion Zone.
3. Does it just go away with time?
The only thing that will solve the radiation problem long-term is time. The half-life of many of the radioactive materials used in power generation is centuries or millennia. That means after the half-life has passed, there is still half of the material left over. Then you again have to wait another period of time for half of it to go away. And this cycle continues until it’s either safe or too small to measure.
4. Does it go into the sky?Radiation goes everywhere. Think of it like ripples on a pond. When you toss a rock in, the ripples spread out from the epicenter. The high-energy particles coming off of the atom can fly out in any  direction until they impact something. Depending on their energy level, they can pass through or be absorbed by the material. Certain radiation is stopped by human skin. Alpha and beta radiation is generally minimally harmful to humans because it can’t easily pass through skin. You have to ingest it by eating or drinking to be affected. But gamma radiation (which is the big killer) can pass through almost everything. Lead is one of the best protectors against gamma radiation. But in the thicknesses needed for adequate protection, it’s weight quickly becomes impractical. In video footage of the liquidators at Chernobyl, you can see they wear “armor” made of lead plates to protect certain parts of their bodies; head, chest, groin. 

5. Do I sound like an idiot? I don't know anything about scientific stuff.
You don’t sound like an idiot. I didn’t know most of this stuff until I started reading about it either in school or before the trip.
6. Are there speed limits in Ukraine like in the USA?
There are speed limits. It can vary depending on location and type of vehicle. Unless otherwise marked, city driving is limited to 60 kph. Residential areas are 20 kph. Regular cars are allowed up to 130 kph on the open highway. The signs don't look the same as in the USA though. It's generally a simple sign with numbers only.

If you want to learn more about speed limits here, go to this link and translate section 12. It has the rules for speed for certain places and vehicles.
     That's about it. I'll be going to a wedding tomorrow so I might have a few things to write about after that. I was interested in seeing what a Ukrainian wedding is like. However, I've been told there has been a trend of young people having more Western style weddings. So we'll see how it turns out.