Tips for other prospective adoptive parents

If you are going to be making a critical phone call, such as changing your flights, be sure you have enough grivna on your phone. Otherwise, you might end up getting cut off in the middle of your conversation with Delta. You might also not be able to call anyone since you don't have any minutes on your phone, leading you to make a long-distance phone call on the hotel phone. Which in turn connects you to your facilitator who has to give you directions on how to get a phone card to add minutes to your phone. You then have to run down to the market, buy a phone card using broken Russian and pantomime, rush back to your hotel, and add the minutes to your phone.

If you shop enough times at the local market, they will give you a frequent shopper card, complete with registration packet, even though you clearly don't even know enough Russian to fill out said registration packet.

If you stay at Hotel Podillya, you do not need to bring any soap or shampoo. Because no matter how many you leave on the counter, you will always get two new soaps and two new shampoo packets every day.

Hotel Podillya makes up for their excessive use of soap with internet that costs 5 grivna per hour from 9am to 9pm, and 3 grivna per hour from 9pm to 9am (yeah, that would be like $0.25 per hour).

New York Street Pizza does not have any employees that speak English, even though all of their signs are in English. They do, however, have an English menu. And it is quite sufficient to order with, although if you are not good enough with your Russian instead of getting 3 pizzas, each with one topping, you will get 3 pizzas each with 3 toppings. Said pizzas will turn out to be so delicious you will return for 3 more the next day (this time with only two toppings, intentionally).