Photos of today's Yanukovych campaign event on Khreshchatyk are here.

The weather was nasty - rain and snow and wind, all more or less together. Several huge drops landed on my camera's lens right away, so the quality of the pictures isn't nice, and I wasn't trying too hard anyway - I was on the way to the Mothercare store at Maidan, for the first time since Marta's birth.

There were very few people, ridiculously few compared to Yulia's Feb. 26 event - but the weather was nice then, and there were free pancakes in addition to all the hats and scarves, and Yulia is much prettier than Yanukovych, too, and - she had bothered to come over to Khreshchatyk in person and give a little address.

A stage was set up, and there was some pop singing, and there were lots of blue flags in the audience - because the audience consisted almost exclusively of the young people hired to carry the blue flags around. That was funny.

I saw a number of bums with Yanukovych plastic bags - happy-looking bums. A guy from one of the tents came up to me and asked me to take one such bag, and I refused, very softly.

I'm glad the weather was lousy and it didn't turn out to be a good day for Yanukovych. And I'm sure it wasn't the weather that kept people away - after all, it was much worse during the Orange Revolution and on its first anniversary. Maybe the terrible campaign songs were the reason people shunned Khreshchatyk today...

One thing I did like, though: the color blue. I loved it, surprisingly. Must be because of a prolonged exposure to Marta's pink and other sweet, girly colors.

Oh, and the Mothercare store is amazing. I spent, like, an hour there, walking around with a silly silly silly smile on my face. I bought two sets of sleepsuits for Marta, but they turned out to be too huge for her yet. I wanted to buy everything, though.

Mothercare is quite expensive, of course, but there are plenty of truly wonderful Ukrainian-made kids' stuff being sold in Kyiv - very, very good quality and not too expensive. They must've learned how to make it this good by working as cheap labor for big foreign labels.

My mama, too, keeps being amazed at all the stuff you can buy for kids now: her experience of trying to dress me in the 1970s was totally different.

And Mishah's mother stopped by today and told us this story: one day, also sometime in the 1970s, she ran into kids' coats being sold in the Passage. Brown coats, nothing too special, but a rarity still. There was a huge line, of course, and as she stood in it, she prayed for there to be enough coats - and for the saleswoman to be kind enough to allow her to buy two - because she had twins to dress. So when it was her turn, people behind her (I mean, assholes behind her) began to bitch: prove us you have two kids, show us your passport, etc. And she didn't have her passport with her - and she ended up getting so upset that she started to cry. And the saleswoman turned out to be of a rare kind, too: she took pity with Mishah's mother and sold her two coats. And she scolded those assholes in the line for being so heartless.

Anyway, here're a few pictures from the Yanukovych event: