At the city administration, that rude woman told me garbage collection's the districts' responsibility, not the city's. She didn't know what district Pushcha is - she asked me and I told her it's Obolon. The thing is, it became part of the city only recently, a few years ago, and before that it was a separate entity.

It all doesn't really matter, though. Garbage is a tiny problem compared to the land/real estate ownership one. I've never studied it closely, but just by looking around you sort of know what's going on: all the deserted buildings, sanatoriums, huge chunks of wonderful land turning into a Pripyat/Chernobyl look-alikes. Their new owners probably sit there quietly, waiting for the complete collapse, and then they can move in, fence the area off and build their mansions or whatever. And the brave/impatient ones are already building - just like they do in the center of the city: huge, ugly stuff squeezed in on impossibly tiny plots of land, and all those poor huts or ruined sanatoriums surround them. And the locals talk about it, too, curse the rich guys, are scared of them. A woman who works at the post office talked yesterday about some guy who recently died of a stroke because they wouldn't let him privatize his hut or something - most likely because someone rich wanted his land in order to expand.

I don't really want to get into all this: I don't want to ruin my first impression - that it's a paradise. I know it's more of a volcano, but I'll pretend it's not for the rest of the summer and then we'll move on.

As for Yushchenko, well, would you guys bother distracting George W. Bush from the war in Iraq to have him clean up the July 4 litter?

***

More garbage photos are now up but I still have to sort them. There are five containers - though it does seem as if there are more, both on the pictures and in reality.