December 28, 2013
Lets focus on the positives: A spot of blind couch-surfing
It rained in the night which made the shoulder of the road too muddy to cycle on in the morning. I was therefore invited to take a much more active part in the 'Pothole-Slalom' game taking place in the road. Someone (is that you God?) had decided this game wasn't dangerous enough as it was and was now to take place in fog so thick one could barely make out the Lada without lights overtaking a bus overtaking a truck overtaking a horse and cart, until it was almost about to end one's life.
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But it wasn't all bad, let's focus on the positives. Most of these involved bus stops, where I was stopping to take my usual breaks. At one of these I was sitting in a quiet little town where nothing much was going on when an old headscarved busty woman came outside of her shop across the street and stood talking on her phone. Some chickens were running around in the dirt near her. A couple of old men in flat caps came and waited at the bus stop. Then a stray dog padded along the road. The village was alive with life, it was absolutely magnificent. Then a horse and cart came sweeping before me along the road. Utterly brilliant! I felt like I had travelled back in time.
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Sometimes I felt like I had travelled back in time to nineteen-crazy-three. The next day, for example, I saw an old woman selling by the side of the road. This was not uncommon, lots of people had been selling apples or flowers at the roadside. But this woman, and I swear I'm not making this up, was selling broomsticks. Proper witches broomsticks with fanned out bristles they were too, and she had nothing else to offer, only these broomsticks. Goodness only knows who was going to stop their car to buy a broomstick at the side of the road from a woman who, lets be completely honest here, must have been a witch.
At least it was sunny this day and actually quite warm, and I had a place to stay for the night in a town called Ivano-Fransisco, or something like that. Andriy, my manager, had arranged a place for me to stay with a guy named Roman. I was given no more information, it was kind of like blind-couchsurfing, it was quite exciting really. I got to Ivano-Francisco at midday and had a couple of hours to explore the town before going to meet Roman, which was lucky because there was a huge market and it was incredibly busy and the road was also blocked and it took me a couple of hours to fight my way through the crowds. It was, for all that, quite a nice city.
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It turned out that Roman was in fact an 18 year old student and I was actually staying in his parent's rather fancy house. This was quite okay with me, because it meant I had my own room and was well fed and could use a washing machine for the first time in far too long. I also found out that Roman's mum was a dentist and so I told her about my filling problem (I have a filling that is loose at the back.) Unfortunately Roman's mum did not speak English and something was definitely lost in his translation (he understood that I had a feeling problem.) She looked in my mouth and declared that I had a wisdom tooth pushing through.
"No, no, my wisdom tooth is fine" I insisted, "My filling is loose."
I looked at my own mouth in the mirror. My filling, which had been half coming out, was somehow now back in exactly the right place.
"Well, it looks okay now, but the problem is my filling is loose, I think I need my filling replacing." I said to Roman.
"You're feeling what?"
"No, my filling."
His mum looked again. She started saying a lot of things in Ukrainian. I looked to Roman for a translation.
"She is saying a lot of dentist terms. I will try to translate." He got out his smartphone and typed and read aloud the resulting translation, "Your dental is in need of ignigtion" he declared proudly.
28/12/13 - 63km
29/12/13 - 43km
Today's ride: 106 km (66 miles)
Total: 11,343 km (7,044 miles)
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